An Autumn Hunting

by Tom Callaghan

  An Autumn Hunting

  Tom Callaghan

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Also by Tom Callaghan

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Acknowledgements

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © 2018 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 78648 237 2

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

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Also by Tom Callaghan

  A Killing Winter

  A Spring Betrayal

  A Summer Revenge

  For

  Mam and Dad

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

  The hardest thing for anyone is to be a human being every day.

  Chingiz Aitmatov

  Chapter 1

  She hadn’t managed to pull the syringe out of her inner thigh before the heroin slammed into her nervous system with the mindless ferocity of the snowstorms that race down from the Tien Shan mountains. Her body sprawled across a chaos of unwashed clothes, grease-stained pizza boxes, crushed Baltika beer cans; all the garbage junkies accumulate when nothing else in life matters but cooking up the next shot. Her cheap unbranded jeans were baggy and bunched around her knees, so I could follow the progress of her addiction by the track marks riding up and down her left leg like cigarette burns.

  She might have been a pretty girl once, dreaming of true love and the next party, but that was all history now. Not for her the first kiss, summer evenings with friends by Lake Issyk-Kul, the rich scent of cut lilies, the crunch of fresh snow underfoot. Now a different kind of snow had consumed her, buried her under a blizzard that blasted death across Central Asia and on into Russia.

  The raw stink of iodine told me at least one person in the squat had been brewing up krokodil. Easy enough to make at home; all you need is codeine, mixed with iodine, red phosphorus from matches, a subtle hint of gasoline, and whatever other poisons you can lay your hands on.

  Inject krokodil and your skin is transformed into something green and scaly as infection and gangrene bite. Hence the name. Your flesh dies and rots away, leaving unhealing sores that chew through tissue and muscle down to the bone.

  The tracks on the girl’s leg were too distinct to be the toothmarks of the crocodile. More likely to be from smack; perhaps she was an old-fashioned sort of girl, kept her knees together except for the thrust of a hypodermic. I knew Kenesh Usupov would have the answer; Bishkek’s chief forensic pathologist has seen it all, sliced it up as well.

  In my career as inspector with the Murder Squad, I’ve found enough OD bodies to know ‘victim’ is the wrong word. As far as I’m concerned, injecting poison into yourself is an act of folly at best, and perhaps in the coiled and hidden recesses of the mind, a desire for suicide, a final ending. I prefer to save the ‘victim’ word for people who don’t bring their death upon themselves, people whose unfortunate paths collide and end with someone else’s greed or cruelty or lust. Harsh? Maybe, but you’re not the one clearing up the consequences. I haven’t lost my compassion for the dead, but it’s not a blanket coverage any more.

  ‘Inspector.’

  I turned round as Kenesh Usupov joined me to stare down at the shipwreck of what had once been a human being. I wouldn’t call Usupov a friend – he’s too humourless and dour to imagine going for a drink or a meal with him – but we’ve worked together for a long time, and we respect each other’s skills. I could never spend my days opening up skulls, weighing parcels of meat. On the other hand, the people he encounters at work don’t try to kill him. To each his own.

  ‘The apartment’s empty, I suppose?’

  I nodded. Standard procedure is to have a uniformed ment go through the scene, gun in hand, checking there’s no crazy guy with a hypo brimming with HIV and looking to share. Hygiene and tidiness aren’t the only things an addict gives up on; they don’t hang around to face difficult questions from some disapproving police officer. Compassion for the body in the room leaves by the door and runs down the stairs.

  We were in Alamedin, near the railroad tracks, in one of the old Khrushchyovka apartments, the prefabricated concrete blocks that sprang up throughout the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War against Hitler.

  Every morning in the summer, you can hear a train trundle dispiritedly on a five-hour trek through Alamedin and the Boom Gorge towards Balykchy on the shore of Lake Issyk-Kul, only to make the return trip the same evening. Further east, the lake is beautiful, clear calm water ringed by snow-topped mountains, but Balykchy is a festering shithole you wouldn’t want to visit twice. I sometimes think if you’re Kyrgyz, you can travel – after all, we’ve traditionally been nomads – but you always end up coming back to where you started. I’ve never known if that’s a good or a bad thing.

  Kenesh and I crouched down, squatting by the body, my knees protesting as I did so. Just one more sign I’d been doing this too long. This close, I could smell the acrid urine from when her bladder had betrayed her. I felt a sudden wave of pity, guessing how
ashamed and humiliated she would have felt with the emptying of her body displayed for the relentless, impersonal gaze of strangers.

  Long streaks of damp stained the rough plaster walls, torn linoleum scuffed and scarred, dirt ground into it until any original pattern had become a faint ghost of a memory, the faded photograph of someone long-forgotten. A cheap wooden kitchen chair lay on its side; I guessed the girl had been sitting there when she took the hot shot and dived head first into death.

  Usupov tapped my arm, pointed at the girl’s groin. A few dark flecks of dried blood had sprayed across white pants.

  ‘Significant?’ I asked.

  Usupov shrugged.

  ‘Hard to say. Maybe her period. Not from the syringe; that’s still in place. I’ll know once she’s on the table.’

  ‘Think this is a suspicious death?’

  Usupov turned to me, shrugged. Pale autumn sunlight through the window flared off his glasses, hid his eyes.

  ‘Unusual, is the word I’d use. Something not quite right.’

  I looked back down at the corpse, couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The dark blue stain of lividity where gravity had pulled her blood back towards earth, the swelling and puffiness of pallid skin where old scars and blemishes traced the map of her life. I’d seen it all too many times.

  ‘Look at the injection sites on her leg,’ Usupov said. ‘All fairly recent. It’s my guess she was right-handed, since the tracks are all in her left leg. Easier to shoot up.’

  He reached over, pulled at her arm.

  ‘This is what’s unusual. No tracks on either arm, not even skin-popping. Most people only start hunting for fresh veins on the legs when the arms give out.’

  It was my turn to shrug.

  ‘So she didn’t want people to know she was using, maybe Mummy and Daddy wouldn’t approve. Maybe she was vain, proud of her soft skin and smooth forearms. It all seems a little thin to me.’

  ‘I’ll know better at the autopsy,’ Usupov said. ‘You’re welcome to watch. If you can be bothered, that is.’

  I stood aside to let the stretcher men go about their work. Below the belt, Chief Forensic Pathologist, I thought. But maybe some truth in it.

  The horrible brokenness of death revealed itself in dangling limbs and a head thrown back. As the body was lifted up, I saw the dark smudge of a bruise on the left of her forehead.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked Usupov, pointing at the mark.

  ‘Perhaps when she hit the floor? Her heart needn’t have stopped beating straight away, which would explain why she could have a bruise. But again, I’ll know more when she’s under the knife.’

  The body hauled away, I could smell something else in the room; fear and despair, bitter and raw on the tongue, making the eyes water but not with tears. I knew better than to say anything to Usupov; he would have looked at me as if I’d gone mad and started spouting allegiance to Comrade Stalin. Instead, I filed the thought away in the dark recess where I store impressions, hints and dreams.

  ‘I’ll do the cut tomorrow morning,’ Usupov said, making for the door, ‘ten o’clock.’

  I nodded, waited until I heard his boots on the landing, began to look for clues. Murder confessions, crumpled notes with dealers’ addresses, mysterious telephone numbers written in cheap lipstick. I’ll grab at any straw, I’m not proud. I was hunting through the pathetic remnants of a life when my phone beeped.

  A text: ‘Meet soonest.’ Sent by Mikhail Tynaliev. Minister of State Security. Every meeting I’d ever endured with him had been the start of grief and the very real possibility I’d end up dead.

  So I knew I was going to find myself up to my chin in shit.

  Chapter 2

  An hour later, I was in Tynaliev’s house, in the ornate drawing room he uses as his private office when he doesn’t want the ministry grapevine spreading the news. I’d been there before; it got no more enjoyable each time, the ritual always the same.

  Waved through a high-tech scanner by sullen guards whose fingers stray worryingly close to the triggers of their Kalashnikovs, and whose eyes beg for the chance to use them.

  Sitting for an hour in an overheated antechamber on an ornate gold-painted chair that manages to be both ugly and uncomfortable, before being ushered into the presence.

  Then face to face with the most dangerous man in Kyrgyzstan.

  Mikhail Tynaliev and I have a history together and it doesn’t make for comforting reading.

  I’d found out who murdered his daughter Yekaterina Tynalieva, then stood by and said nothing while Tynaliev had the man butchered like a hog.

  I’d tracked down a vicious paedophile killer with high connections, then ignored Tynaliev’s order to let the matter drop ‘in the interests of the state’. Instead, I’d attached a bomb to the killer’s car, blown him to hell.

  And most recently, I’d tracked down Tynaliev’s mistress in Dubai, after she’d ‘liberated’ ten million dollars from his secret bank accounts. I recovered most of his money, but not without a lot of blood and death along the way.

  All of which meant Tynaliev used me for his dirty work, but didn’t trust me. I knew too many of his secrets. Not a reassuring position to be in.

  Tynaliev stared at me, eyes unblinking, intense. A bear of a man, shorter than official photographs suggested, jacket drawn tight over massive shoulders, muscles stretching the cloth out of shape. His hands slept on the desk in front of him, knuckles scarred and brutal. Easy to imagine him interrogating some poor soul in the soundproof basement at Sverdlovsky station; a slap, a punch, a kick, blood lashing across the tiled walls, a broken tooth lying on the stained floor.

  The long silence grew more uncomfortable as the seconds dragged by. Just as I was ready to confess to whatever Tynaliev thought I’d done, he jerked a thumb in my direction.

  ‘Sit.’

  I did as I was told. The minister picked up a sheet of paper, read it in silence. My price for having recovered his money from his former mistress had been a demand for reinstatement into the Murder Squad. I wondered if this was confirmation. Of course, Tynaliev being who he was, it might just as easily have been a sentence in Penitentiary One in the hope I’d catch TB or HIV from one of the other prisoners. If I didn’t catch a home-made shiv first.

  ‘You were at a suspicious death earlier,’ he said, not looking up at me.

  ‘A young woman. OD. Probably heroin,’ I said, adding ‘Sir,’ to be on the safe side.

  ‘Suspicious?’ he asked.

  I shrugged. I wondered at his interest, but there was nothing concrete to suggest anything more, and with Tynaliev, it’s always better to say as little as possible.

  Tynaliev shook his head, dismissing her death as unimportant, just another statistic, and at best a one-paragraph entry on an inner page of Achyk Sayasat. That’s one of the differences between the two of us, and it maybe explains why I never became a politician. As far as the dead are concerned, I believe either they all count or none of them do.

  ‘You’re off that case,’ Tynaliev announced, putting the sheet of paper down staring at me.

  ‘So I’m back in Murder Squad?’ I asked. ‘As inspector?’

  Tynaliev pursed his lips, stabbing a meaty forefinger onto the paper in front of him. The room was very warm, airless. I could sense panic rising in my stomach, did my best to look expressionless.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said.

  He pushed the paper towards me, gesturing for me to read it.

  The paper was headed ‘PRESS RELEASE’. It went downhill very rapidly after that.

  A prominent member of the Bishkek Murder Squad is under investigation, accused of crimes against the state, including murder, corruption, extortion and blackmail. The serious nature of these allegations means the officer has been relieved of all duties and is suspended with immediate effect, without pay. If the allegations are proven to have substance, the officer will be named, brought to trial, and faces severe punishment.

  Signed, Mikhail T
ynaliev, Minister of State Security.

  I read the statement, my face a mask to hide the shock and anger boiling up inside me. I didn’t need to ask who the unnamed officer was. I screwed the paper up, tossed it back onto Tynaliev’s desk.

  ‘This is just bullshit. Sir,’ I said, failing to keep the rage out of my voice. Now it was Tynaliev’s turn to shrug. He smoothed out the sheet of paper, read through it once more, locked it away in a desk drawer, together with my career.

  ‘Just be glad I didn’t name you,’ Tynaliev said. ‘Yet.’

  Tynaliev’s security team were wise to confiscate my Makarov at the scanner, or I’d have been tempted to press the barrel hard against his head, maybe even pull the trigger. But I was already wondering why Tynaliev had decided to break the news to a lowly inspector, rather than hand the task over to a police station chief. As always with the minister, the cards you saw in his hand were never part of the real game.

  ‘Personally, I know you’re too honest – or too stupid – to get up to this sort of nonsense,’ he continued, a gesture of dismissal underscoring his words. ‘And believe me, I’m not your enemy. Which doesn’t mean you don’t have any.’

  I understood the logic behind his words; only a very confident or foolish person would take on the whole state apparatus that stood behind Tynaliev.

  ‘I’m afraid it gets worse for you, Borubaev,’ he added, pouring a shot of vodka, not offering me one, throwing it back in a single practised move.

  ‘In a few days, during our investigations, we’ll uncover positive proof you’ve been involved in smuggling heroin, and you took on the case of today’s tragic OD of an innocent young girl to cover up your tracks. And hers, of course.’

  Tynaliev smiled at his witticism, poured another shot.

  ‘You may even have administered the fatal dose yourself, to shut her up,’ he added.

  ‘So put me up against a wall and shoot me,’ I said, ‘but I don’t understand why you’re doing this. Is this to do with Natasha Sulonbekova?’

  Tynaliev winced at the mention of his former mistress and his disappearing fortune, shook his head.