A Killing Winter (3 page)

‘Vasily, you’re as much use as a split condom. But if I hear that you know something, and you decide to keep it all to your shit-rotten self, then
zhopu porvu margala vikoliu
, understand?’

Vasily nodded, sombre. When an Inspector promises to rip you a new arse and then poke out your eyes, it tends to focus the mind. Vasily slipped another mask on to his face, the one of genuine concern and community duty.

‘It’s terrible, terrible, that murders like these happen,’ he said. ‘That poor girl.’ He shook his head at the iniquity of the world, before the mask slipped. ‘Besides, it’s bad for business.’

‘You’re all heart, Vasily,’ I said, and pinched his cheek, not like a
babushka
with her favourite grandson, but hard enough to make his eyes water and his head twist forward. For a second, I thought I’d provoked him enough to kick off, and I slipped my hand towards the Yarygin. He saw my move, and settled back, rubbing his cheek.

‘Always a joker, Inspector, always good to see you.’

I gave him the hard stare until his gaze broke, and then walked to the door. My shoulder blades itched, but he didn’t have the balls to try anything. Not that day, at any rate. But I didn’t feel really comfortable until I was up the stairs and out on the street. There was no sign of Lubashov, never a bad thing, and the freezing air tasted sweet and clean.

It had started to snow again, and the tracks I’d made earlier were already half hidden; a couple of hours, and it would be as if I’d never existed. I thought of the young woman under the trees and the soft white flakes that bloomed on her body, of Chinara and the earth that covered her face, and my cheeks were wet with snow, or perhaps tears. For perhaps the thousandth time, I wondered how I could carry on in a world where love always ends. And for the thousandth time, I told myself that no one really dies until there is no one left to remember them. All any of us can do is try to weather each storm, and help the ones we love to do the same.

I spat to flush the bar’s rancid stink out of my mouth, and started trudging through the snow towards home. But I’d only walked a couple of blocks from the club when I heard the crunch of footsteps behind me, not quite a run, coming up fast.

The Yarygin was already in my hand, safety catch off, as I swung round to face my future.

I
was a split second away from aiming and pulling the trigger when I saw that it wasn’t Lubashov or one of his
droogs
about to deliver a coup de grâce.

‘For fuck’s sake!’

The kind of squeaky voice you hear when a grim middle-aged slag tries to convince you that she’s young and desirable, despite the overwhelming evidence. At least this one was young, but you’d have needed a lot of vodka on board to find her desirable. Skirt just about covering her moneymaker, thick legs turning blue with cold, trowelled make-up and a cleavage of plucked chicken skin. She started to walk towards me, reaching into her handbag.

‘Staying right where you are will do just fine,’ I said, all too aware that I’d been about to blow a teenage prostitute out of her fake leather boots. I holstered the Yarygin and put my hand in my pocket, where she couldn’t see it shake.

‘And you can take your hand out slowly,’ I added. Most of these girls carry razors, and more scars are something I don’t need. Her face revealed annoyance and fear as she took out her cigarettes, tapped one from the pack and waved it at me for a light. I ignored it so, with a melodramatic sigh, she rummaged in her bag for her lighter. Smoke mingled with her breath on the air, making her head disappear into a thick blue fog for a brief second.

‘You don’t remember me?’

As she drew deeply on her cigarette and plumed the smoke
upwards, I looked at her. Something about her was familiar, but she could have been a thousand working girls I’ve seen over the years, defiant outside, broken and cowed inside. The same lacklustre hopes beaten out of her by poverty, drugs and the fists of a hundred men.

Her eyes stared back at me, black and unreadable, marbles in the pallor of her face.

‘Shairkul? You remember? You helped me a couple of years back?’

I shrugged.

‘Outside Fire and Ice at closing time? Some bitch tried to stab me, when her punter decided I’d be the better ride. I punched the cow out, and you stopped me doing worse.’

A memory surfaced. I vaguely remembered taking a knife out of some girl’s hand, throwing it in the gutter and telling her to piss off before I took her down the station. I’d given her a few
som
and bullied a reluctant taxi driver into taking her home. Maybe this was her, but maybe not. Shairkul, meaning ‘joyful’, but there was nothing very joyful about her.

‘You could have arrested me, but you didn’t. So I owe you.’

I stayed silent. Gratitude isn’t something you generally expect from a working girl. Life throws enough shit at them without them having to drop to their knees at the memory of a good deed, or do any favours once they’re there. She might have had something to tell, but I didn’t expect her to volunteer the information.

‘I saw you talking to Vasily. In the bar.’

Now I placed her. One of the two hookers in the corner, getting a punter to rise to the bait.

‘You were asking about the murder up on Ibraimova, weren’t you?’

‘And if I was?’

‘I might be able to help you.’

‘You know who she was?’

‘No.’

‘You know who killed her?’

‘No.’

Shairkul smiled, revealing a wide-gapped row of golden teeth. Business had obviously been good, once upon a time. She knew she had my interest now, and I was waiting for the squeeze.

‘I left that pisshead back there to come and talk to you. That’s got to be worth something.’

I nodded, and her smile got wider. A mistake; a couple of her teeth were missing, and it didn’t add to her charms. She stepped forward and put her hand on my sleeve.

‘It’s fucking cold. Maybe we can go somewhere?’

I removed her hand, and nodded again.

‘I’ve got a spare bed you can have. Down the station. You might have to share with some ninety-kilo bulldyke dreaming of breaking in a sweet little slut like you, but hey, it’s all girls together, right? And in the morning, when you’ve rinsed out the blood, we can have our little chat.’

Her face hardened, and she turned to spit.

‘You’re a bastard, Inspector, I bet you have to pay to fuck your wife. Everyone else does.’

She took a step back at the look on my face, and held up her hands in apology.

‘OK, sorry, start again? I can help you. With the killing? There’s a reward going, maybe? For information? And Vasily doesn’t have to know, right?’

Suddenly I felt old, washed up, as if I’d been listening to the same lies, self-justifications and greed all my life. I nodded my head towards a doorway, to get us off the street. She
took a final drag of her cigarette, flicked it away and stumbled after me.

Out of the wind, her cheap perfume burnt my eyes. The top must have come off the bottle.

‘She was cut up, right? I mean, badly cut up? And someone shoved a baby inside her belly?’

‘You’ve got big ears, and someone’s got a big mouth.’

She pouted. This wasn’t going the way she’d planned; grateful cop gives her a handful of notes and a Get Out of Jail card. She fumbled through her bag for another cigarette, found only an empty pack, crumpled it up, dumped it. I offered her one of mine, and she leant forward as I lit hers and mine. True romance. I could almost hear the violins.

‘My friend Gulbara told me a girl had been killed.’

‘And she knew, how?’

I didn’t expect that she’d tell me. Gulbara, if she even existed, wouldn’t be likely to share her informant at the station with anyone. But you have to ask, make sure they don’t think they can get away with anything.

‘I wasn’t sure if I should believe her or not. But then Vasily told us as well. Said not to worry, that we could keep on working, that this guy wasn’t interested in working girls.’

Typical Vasily. As long as the
som
came in, he wouldn’t give a fuck if his whole stable got slaughtered. Plenty more where they came from.

As if she read my mind, Shairkul took a final, lung-bursting drag from her cigarette, threw it away.

‘He would say that, right?’

I nodded.

‘So what should we do?’

I shrugged again.

‘What did Gulbara say?’

She took a step back, took a fresh look at me.

‘You don’t give a fuck either, do you?’

‘What do you want me to do? Give you money to catch the bus back to your village? Call out the army to give you twenty-four-hour protection? You know how it works.’ I threw her the tough-but-honest-cop stare. ‘You tell me what you know, I find the dickhead, book him in at the no-star hotel, and we all go back to work as normal.’

Shairkul seemed less than reassured by this, and gestured for another cigarette. At this rate, it would be lung cancer that laid her out on Usupov’s slab, long before any crazies got to her.

‘She wasn’t one of us, not a regular working girl. But you already know that, right?’

‘I know what we know. What I want is what you know.’

Even though the street was deserted, Shairkul looked over her shoulder before speaking.

‘She wouldn’t have lasted three hours without a pimp, you know how this town’s carved up.’

I winced at the word, remembering the frozen stare gazing out past the trees towards uncaring stars, the uncoiled tangle of guts, the half-clenched fingers of the foetus.

‘So she was an amateur, that’s what you’re telling me?’

Shairkul smiled; there’d be a price for her information.

‘Is there a reward?’

‘For you?’

I stopped for effect, reached for my cigarettes. Shairkul grinned, the money already as good as in her handbag.

‘Let me explain. I saw the body of a young woman hacked up worse than I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty. Some other woman, if she’s still alive, is mourning the death of her
unborn child. So my patience is not just wearing thin, it’s non-existent. And I’m in a hurry.’

I grabbed Shairkul’s jacket and pulled her to me, so close that anyone passing by would think we were lovers, oblivious of the cold. I lowered my voice to the gentle, persuasive murmur that I’ve always found more menacing than a shout or a snarl.

‘Unless you start talking, I’m going to tell Vasily just how talkative you can be. You know how pimps feel about girls that use their mouths for something other than giving a customer a blow. And then you won’t be talking at all, will you?’

I smiled with my mouth and not my eyes, and gently tapped her cheek.

‘Gulbara found her,’ Shairkul gabbled, face white under the caked
prosti
make-up. ‘She thought she might find some drunk up for a short time in their car, on the way home from the Blonder.’

‘Go on,’ I said, and tapped her cheek again to refresh her memory.

‘She saw the girl’s handbag. Good quality, designer. She figured there’d be money, a mobile, maybe even car keys.’

‘She didn’t think to be a good citizen and call us?’

Even terrified, Shairkul smiled. We both knew that nobody does anything to help the police in this town, unless there’s something in it for them.

‘So Gulbara’s got a fancy new handbag. What about it?’

‘It’s what’s in the bag that’s important.’

‘And now you’ll take me to Gulbara, as long as you get your piece?’

Shairkul nodded.

‘You want to get the bag sooner rather than later,
da
?’

I couldn’t fault her logic.

‘We’ll go see Gulbara, and discuss it all later, OK? One hand washes the other.’

I used my mobile to call a patrol car. When we got in, Shairkul gave an address on the far side of Osh bazaar. The patrol car’s flashing lights bounced off the hard-packed snow, the colour of blood, the colour of death.

‘Stop here,’ Shairkul said, ‘I don’t want police shaming me in front of my neighbours.’

Which just about sums up how most Kyrgyz, decent or otherwise, feel about us.

‘You didn’t say you lived with Gulbara.’

Now it was Shairkul’s turn to shrug.

‘You didn’t ask.’

Having an idea what was in store, I borrowed a torch from the reluctant uniform, who grumbled about its return, and then we walked round the corner, towards a dilapidated
khrushchyovk
apartment block.

The city is full of these relics of our Soviet days, solid, durable, ugly and practical, named after the former Soviet premier who’d had them installed across the Union. You‘d never describe them as stylish, but they’re an improvement on the shacks or yurts that we lived in before, especially when the winter sets in and the snow descends from the Tien Shan.

The building’s five-storey cement prefabricated panels were stained and cracked, and some wit had spray-painted HILTON above the entrance. The metal door hung open, and we pushed through into the dark. You never find a
khrushchyovka
where the communal lights work, so I switched on the torch and we walked up the litter-covered stairs towards the lift. By some miracle, it wheezed into life and we rode in silence up to the fifth floor.

Outside the apartment, Shairkul started to speak, but I held my finger up for silence. I didn’t want any surprises on the other side of the door, and that meant not alerting whoever was inside. She unlocked the heavy-duty steel door, and then the ornamental wooden door inside, and I gripped the Yarygin.

We went inside.

Someone had been smoking
travka
; the thick sweet smell was everywhere. But the apartment was clean and neat, cheaply furnished. Whatever failings Shairkul and Gulbara might have had, slovenliness wasn’t one of them.

The bedroom door was ajar and, from the sounds inside, Gulbara was obviously hard at work. Reluctant to interrupt anyone’s pleasure, I peeked round the door. Plain walls, a couple of worn rugs on the bare concrete floor, a couple of half-drunk beer bottles on a bedside table. The ideal setting for an erotic tempest. The bed was creaking like an old ship in a storm, and Gulbara was moaning and groaning as if about to be shipwrecked.

‘
Da, maloletka, da!
’

Gulbara might or might not have been a little slut, but the man thrusting between her legs was certainly a fat pig. Coarse black hair spread like a rug across his shoulders and down his back and on to the top of his arse. He was doing his best to push the bottle-blonde beneath him through the thin mattress, his head buried in her hair, nuzzling her neck.

Gulbara’s eyes widened at the sight of me, and I put my finger to my lips as I tiptoed to the bed.

I waited until the punter’s grunting accelerated, then placed the front sight of my Yarygin against his arsehole.

I didn’t know if that triggered his orgasm or simply gave him a heart attack, but he squealed, yelled and farted all at
once. He rolled off Gulbara, at some considerable pain to both of them, and covered his rapidly dwindling erection with both hands. Gulbara was less modest, probably as a result of fucking strangers morning, noon and night, and simply reached for her cigarettes on the floor.

I did my best not to stare, and motioned Shairkul in the vague direction of the mattress. My smile was not guaranteed to inspire confidence in any of the trio.

‘Let’s all make ourselves comfortable, and then we can have a little chat.’