The lobby itself was deserted. It was less cluttered and in a better state of repair than that in Tunjin’s block, but displayed the same mix of pale wood veneer and beige painted walls. Tunjin began to move nervously toward the glass paneled front doors, but Agypar held up his hand. “No, this way,” he said.
He turned back behind the stairway. Set into the wall under the stairs was a door with a combination security lock. Agypar adeptly entered a sequence of numbers and then slowly pushed open the door. Beyond, Tunjin could make out a further flight of stairs heading down into a basement.
Agypar reached behind the doorframe and pressed a light switch. There was only a single, low-wattage bulb hanging halfway down the stairs, but it was sufficient to allow a safe passage. Agypar gestured Tunjin in front of him, and the two of them began to make their way down, Agypar carefully closing the door behind them.
“The rubbish bins are down here,” Agypar explained. “I think the layout of this block is a little different from the others.”
It was certainly different from Tunjin’s block, which had concrete floors at ground level and no basement. Tunjin was aware that the land fell away behind the rows of apartment blocks, so he assumed that while the ground floor of this block was at street level at the front, there was room for an additional lower story at the rear.
At the bottom of the stairs, there was a further door. Tunjin pushed it slowly open and peered into the gloom beyond. It was, as he had expected, a utility room—there were a couple of large-scale sinks, a workbench with some evidence of recent use, a scattering of household furniture and appliances in varying states of repair, and what appeared to be part of a motorbike. At the far end of the room there were two pale rectangles where daylight shone faintly through two grimy windows.
Agypar moved to stand beside Tunjin and gestured down the length of the room. “The door there,” he said. “It has a security lock on the outside, but you can open it from in here. It comes out into the camp, so it’s not immediately visible from the road or the back of the apartments.”
He led Tunjin through the dimly lit maze of junk toward the door. “I will not turn on the lights in here,” he said. “We do not want to risk giving any prior warning. We need to gain as much time as we can.” It was clear that he was enjoying the experience. This was, Tunjin supposed, the closest he had come to combat since retiring from the army. Tunjin wondered whether he had had a civilian job, or whether, like so many discarded from the army as the Soviet Union imploded, he had found himself without any job or prospects. At least, unlike many others, he had not found himself on the streets.
As they approached the windows, Agypar paused, raising his hand to stop Tunjin moving further forward. The windows were grimy and dust stained, and had clearly not been cleaned for many years. Combined with the bright sunshine, this meant that their movements were unlikely to be visible to any external observer.
Agypar pointed through the window. “There,” he said, “you see the row of motorcycles.” It was the same row that Tunjin had observed from the landing windows earlier—a line of aged but apparently serviceable machines. “The one on the far left, the black one. That is mine.” He reached into his pocket and produced a single ignition key. “Do you know how to ride a motorcycle?”
Tunjin glanced down at his overweight body. “I used to,” he said. “I was a real enthusiast when I was younger. Used to ride out on to the steppes. But I haven’t done it for a long while. I guess you don’t forget, but I don’t know that my body’s got as good a memory as I have.”
Agypar smiled. “I don’t think you forget,” he said. “I still ride it from time to time. But not much now. So take it. It will start perfectly, first time. It always does.”
“Are you sure? I mean, it’s—”
“You need help,” Agypar said. “I am in a position to provide it. That is all. Basic hospitality. And I am sure when you return here, you will return the bike.”
“Well, yes, of course,” Tunjin said. “But I don’t know when that will be. Or even if it will be. I don’t know how far I’ll get.”
“If you don’t get far,” Agypar laughed, “I will come and collect the motorbike for myself.”
“Okay. Well, thanks. Thank you very much.”
“So,” Agypar said, reverting to his military manner, “you open the door. You run, as far as you can—” He glanced down at Tunjin’s body, tacitly acknowledging that this was unlikely to be particularly quickly. “Get the bike and get the hell out of here. Do you want me to cover you?”
“Cover me?”
Agypar waved the shotgun in front of him. “Cover you.”
“No,” Tunjin said. “You’ve done more than enough for me. You mustn’t do anything to put yourself in danger.” He wondered whether the old man really understood what he was potentially involved in here.
Agypar shrugged. “A pity,” he said. “I was always good at providing cover.”
“Thanks, anyway,” Tunjin said. “For everything.” He had little time to waste, he realized. There was no telling where Muunokhoi’s people were by now, no telling how much—or how little—time he might have.
“Okay,” he said, breathlessly, and, twisting the handle of the security lock, he stepped out into the cool sunlight.
The ger camp seemed deserted, although there was still smoke rising from one or two of the tents themselves. Off to his left, a flock of chickens in an enclosure was burbling gently, scratching in the dust. Somewhere in the distance, he could hear the faint hum of traffic, the shouts of children.
He looked right toward the main street, but there was no sign of life. To his left, behind the apartment blocks, the land fell gently away into waste ground. Beyond that, there were the remains of some industrial buildings, now unused and collapsing, their roofs open to the sky.
Tunjin took a deep breath and began to jog as quickly as his bulk would permit. The motorcycles were perhaps a hundred meters away, no more. He clutched the key firmly in his hand and pounded on, his breath already coming in gasps.
He was perhaps twenty-five meters from the bikes when he heard a shout behind him. For a moment he almost paused, tempted to look back in case Agypar was trying to attract his attention. But there would be time enough for that when he reached the bike.
There was another shout behind him and then the sound of a bullet shot. He tensed, poised for the potential impact, but nothing happened. He pounded on. Ten yards. Five yards. The sweat poured from his body. Finally, he grabbed the motorbike handlebars, and pulled the machine toward him. Gasping, he lifted his leg over the seat, slumped down and looked for the ignition, forcing the key into the lock. It turned and, just as Agypar had predicted, the engine fired immediately.
Finally, the machine throbbing beneath him, Tunjin looked back the way he had come. There was a figure running toward him, brandishing a handgun, shouting. Still probably fifty meters away.
Tunjin hesitated a moment, wondering whether to try to flee and risk being shot in the back, or to drive straight at the shouting figure. He was beginning to rev the engine with the intention of doing the latter when a second gunshot echoed around the buildings. The man paused, as though surprised, and then fell forward, clutching his knee, his shouts transformed into screams of pain.
Tunjin looked back behind the man to where Agypar was standing in the doorway of the basement, the shotgun in his hand. Tunjin was too far away to see his face, but he suspected that Agypar was smiling at the accuracy of his shot.
There was no time to ponder the implications of what he had just witnessed. He twisted the bike handlebars, and then—initially unsteadily as his large body grew accustomed to balancing on the narrow seat, but then with growing confidence—he accelerated the motorbike across the waste-ground, down between the walls of the broken down factories, and then out toward the open steppe.
The bike was a smart 1950s British Vincent, which must have been lovingly maintained by the old man. For a brief second, before rationalit
y caught up with him, he almost enjoyed the sensation of power and speed as he pulled out of the dark alleys into the brilliant sunlight beyond. This machine would need looking after, he thought, until he could get it back.
But that, of course, was to assume that he ever could, or that Agypar would be there to receive him. In truth, the future looked bleak. He could scarcely look after himself, let alone the bike. He had no idea where he was heading, or what he was going to do once he got there. Behind him was a ruthless gangster who would, he was sure, now stop at nothing to catch up with him. And, in shooting the man chasing him, Agypar had very probably signed his own death warrant.
It was a mess. It was the biggest mess that Tunjin, never the most fastidious of individuals, had been caught up in. And, this time, he really couldn’t see how he was going to extricate himself.
CHAPTER 9
“They were here. Not so long ago,” Doripalam said. “Look, you can see the marks in the grass left by the tents.”
Luvsan was leaning back against the hood of the Daihatsu, smoking a cigarette. “I feel like the Lone Ranger,” he said. Luvsan prided himself on his knowledge of Western popular culture.
Doripalam raised an eyebrow. “Which would make me Tonto, I suppose.”
“Certainly not, Kemo Sabe,” Luvsan said. “I’m the sidekick here.”
Doripalam stared at him for a moment. There were times when Luvsan’s youthful exuberance bordered on the insolent. “And you’re the one with the tracking skills,” he said, gesturing toward the satellite navigation equipment in the front of the truck. “I’m trusting you know where we are.”
“More or less,” Luvsan said, in a voice that implied that he was above considerations of geographical precision.
“More rather than less, I hope,” Doripalam said. “All I know is that we’re miles from anywhere.”
This was probably another waste of time, he thought, but there was a risk that everything was slowly spiraling out of his control and he wanted to try to get some purchase on it before it was too late. It wasn’t just the Muunokhoi case and everything that went with that. There’d also been the missing youth, Gavaa, a case that had seemed trivial but nevertheless brought them unexpected flak from the press. And then there was the murder of Gavaa’s mother, which had come from nowhere and, so far, seemed to be leading them pretty much to the same destination.
Fortunately, for all their previous criticisms of the handling of the Gavaa disappearance, the press seemed more interested in the mystery of his mother’s murder than in throwing more mud at the police. For the moment, anyway. Doripalam didn’t delude himself that this was anything more than a respite. The truth was that for now the murder story—middle-aged woman found brutally slain in a ger, son missing, nomad family apparently moved on—was extraordinary enough in its own right. It didn’t need the added spice of routine police-bashing. But as soon as interest in the story began to wane, the press would once again begin to ask how the police had allowed this to happen, why they weren’t doing more to solve the crime, whether they could guarantee the safety of other citizens, and—well, any other hook they could find to spin the story out for a few more issues.
His team had been working relentlessly over the last few days—the usual grind of detailed police-work, driven by the ever-present knowledge that, without some rapid breakthrough, the case was increasingly likely to slip through their hands. Doripalam had overseen all the key activities—setting up a response team close to the crime-scene, allocating the familiar round of essential duties, holding daily briefing meetings with the core team, fending off the gaggle of news and TV reporters. It was all straightforward stuff, the usual well-rehearsed routine. The kind of activity he could handle without thinking. And that was the trouble. He wasn’t thinking. Not directly about the murder, anyway. His thoughts kept drifting elsewhere, pulled away from the task at hand, drawn inexorably by the sense that the true story was elsewhere, that there was some link he was failing to grasp.
But the routines of the investigation went on. The first task had been to try to track down Mrs. Tuya’s missing family. It was still not clear whether their departure was linked to her murder—although the abandonment of the gers suggested so—or whether they had already moved on when the killing occurred. Either way, the family of nomads had so far proved surprisingly elusive.
In practice, tracking down nomads was never entirely straightforward, particularly if they did not want to be found. These days, many travelers carried shortwave radios, and there were established procedures for sending and receiving messages through the state radio channels. Some even carried satellite phones, although the cost of these was prohibitive to most. The majority of nomads were now registered within a given region for voting and social security purposes, and some would make regular trips into the local towns to collect benefits or for other purposes. Again, there were standard arrangements for leaving messages through these channels. And, finally, of course, the police and other local services had their own networks within particular regions and could often establish, relatively quickly, the location of a particular individual or group.
Establishing contact with a nomad might be a slow process, but it was usually successful. The message would be picked up by someone locally and, through whatever tortuous means, would eventually make its way to the intended recipient.
In this case, the police had taken all the steps they could to get the message out. The story had been well covered in the press and on the television and radio, and the police had issued an appeal for the family to contact them. They had sent out similar messages through the police and social security networks in the north of the county, with the assumption that, before too long, someone would have identified the party of herdsmen.
But, for several days, there was very little response. There was the usual scattering of crank calls, a few that were well-intentioned but contained no information of substance, and one or two that appeared promising but where the apparent trail very quickly vanished.
They got their first serious lead five days after the body was found. It was a call from one of the provincial police stations up north of the capital, in the rich grasslands in the upper parts of the Bulgan aimag. One of the regional nomads had, in the course of reporting some trivial theft, mentioned—with a mild hint of xenophobia—that there were some unknown herdsmen in the area. The implication had been that, even if they were not directly responsible for the theft, they were nonetheless probably up to no good.
The policeman in question, although skeptical of the claims, had made a casual trip out to visit the camp, making inquiries about where the group had come from and to where it was traveling. It had been difficult, he said. The group clearly resented his presence and his questions, no doubt aware of what the locals might be saying about them. They had responded openly, but coolly, that they had traveled from the south looking for better pastureland, but that they expected only to stay a few days. The policeman had wondered about asking for their formal identity documents but could see no justification for a heavy-handed approach. There was no evidence of stolen property in the camp, and he had no grounds for suspecting the group of any crime.
It was only later, when he was re-reading through the various communiqués sent from headquarters during a quiet morning—of which there were many—that it occurred to him that this group might have been Mrs. Tuya’s family. And finally, after a protracted series of calls around the capital’s police network, the information had reached the Serious Crimes Team.
Doripalam had decided almost instantly to travel up here himself with Luvsan. But he had quickly begun to wonder whether they were wasting their time. They didn’t even know for sure that Mrs. Tuya’s family were in a position to tell them anything useful. If they had left, by arrangement, before her murder, then it was quite possible that they were unaware that she was dead, let alone in a position to shed any light on her killing. If that was the case, then Doripalam’s role was little more than that of t
he junior sent to break the bad news. He doubted that the message would be any more palatable because it came from the senior officer.
And, of course, they didn’t even know that this was Mrs. Tuya’s family in the first place. Okay, they had come from outside the region, but then these people were, when all was said and done, nomads. Travel was what they did. Most of them tended to travel within relatively circumscribed boundaries, but it was far from unknown for them to travel further afield.
And, on top of all that, it now turned out that, by the time Doripalam and Luvsan reached the region, the camp had already moved on.
Looking round, Doripalam wondered quite why they had decided to do so. This was a beautiful place. From where they stood, the lush grassland stretched ahead of them, rising up into the gentle hills which formed the start of the Bürengiin Nuruu mountains. In the morning sunlight, the color of the grass was extraordinary, a shimmering gauze of emerald, shaded by the shifting patterns of the thin fluffy clouds above. Above them, snaking down the foothills, they could see the glittering twisted cable of a mountain stream, which widened into a narrow river and then a broad pool a hundred or so meters across the plain, before disappearing again, presumably back underground. Away across the hills, there were dark shadows of conifers, the first harbingers of the massive Siberian forests that lay beyond the nearby borders.
But, whatever the beauty of the surroundings, it was clear that the camp had indeed moved on. As Doripalam had pointed out, it was possible to discern the shadows and indentations that showed where the cluster of circular gers had been erected. There were some dark patches in the grass where the stoves had stood, and some cropped and scrubby areas of grass where horses or goats had been tethered. Judging from the marks, it looked as if the herdsmen had not been gone for long—perhaps a day, maybe two.
“So what now?” Luvsan said, lighting another cigarette. He had tossed his previous stub carelessly into the grass. Doripalam had watched its arc and landing with some distaste.
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