by G. D. Abson
Lagunov looked as if he’d been slapped. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘But you do. A witness saw you outside her apartment. Tell me what you were doing between seven and eight on Friday morning.’
‘I was at the office but I should also remind you I have legal privilege.’
‘Not if I determine that you are a suspect.’
He held both hands up, halfway to a surrender. ‘Let’s calm down. Whoever you spoke to was mistaken. I always get to the office early on Friday. I was here between seven and eight; in fact, I was here all day.’
She poised with her pen over her notepad. ‘I want you to understand that you are giving me an alibi. Is there anyone who can corroborate it?’
‘Ask anyone who gets in that early, they’ll tell you the same thing. There again I’m not under any kind of suspicion so you can do what you like with my so-called alibi.’ He snorted. ‘Why are you persisting when you already have her killers? If I make some calls it won’t be me facing difficult questions.’
‘If that’s a threat you’d better be very careful.’
‘Not a threat – mere curiosity.’
‘A girl is drunk on the streets when the two suspects—’
‘Call them what they are,’ Lagunov spat, ‘gopniks.’
She ignored him. ‘The two suspects find her drunk on the street. The one hooked on krokodil steals her money, the other sexually assaults her. They take her somewhere for nearly three days then they kill her and burn the body.’
‘That’s what the police are saying.’
‘But there are still unanswered questions. If they dragged her to the park, alive or dead, someone would have seen them. The only way she got there was voluntarily.’
‘Voluntarily?’ Lagunov smirked. ‘She danced to the park hand-in-hand with those gopnik scum? That’s ridiculous.’
‘Then how did they get her there without being seen? It’s the White Nights, remember, no one sleeps. Teenagers are out there all night. Someone would have called the menti. Besides, it’s a stupid place. Why not dump her on a building site or wasteland, wherever was nearest…unless…’
She trailed off but Lagunov had no interest in prompting her; he tapped his fingers on the desk in irritation.
‘Unless…it was deliberate. Her killers wanted it to be public,’ she added.
He sighed. ‘You give too much credit to a pair of junkies. From what I read they were high on krokodil. Who knows what goes on in their addled brains? Maybe they carried her between them and everyone mistook them for drunks.’ Lagunov folded his hands behind his head. ‘Just let it go and Thorsten will thank you.’
She was amused by his persistence. ‘And how much would he offer? Ten thousand dollars?’
Lagunov laughed out loud. ‘That’s kopeks to him.’
‘Then what about fifty?’
She anticipated laughter but Lagunov was matter-of-fact. ‘Now I’ll answer your questions,’ he began. ‘Thorsten isn’t the man you saw on the plane. He’s tired and withdrawn. Yes, he’s in Piter but there’s a media circus waiting for him in Stockholm and no one knows him here. Piter is also the last place Zena knew before she died and that gives him great comfort. As for Felix Axelsson, the security advisor that got you so excited, well, it would be insane for Thorsten to travel around the city without a bodyguard. There’s no mystery to any of this. The gopniks confessed, they left their prints on Zena’s handbag, and they took indecent pictures of her.’
‘I’m not saying they didn’t do it, but there’s more to this case than a pair of wasted teenagers. Where was Zena kept? How did they get her to the park? Why go to the trouble of burning her body to destroy the evidence when they go and leave her handbag behind with their sticky fingerprints on it. You know what my favourite one is?’
‘Humour me.’
‘They hadn’t washed for days when they were caught but they didn’t they smell of smoke.’
Lagunov exhaled heavily. ‘So what’s your theory?’
‘Someone else was involved, and he set them up.’
Lagunov was incredulous. ‘For what reason?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Natalya…Captain, this is beneath you. You should keep these ill-considered ideas to yourself. You’re not going to exploit Thorsten or get his hopes up. In fact you’re not going to do anything. As we discussed I’m happy to come to an arrangement so that you leave Zena Dahl to rest in peace and let a father grieve for his daughter.’
She pulled out her mobile and studied it as if there had been a missed call then tapped the screen for voice memos. Instead of pocketing it, she shoved it under the chair’s cushion.
Lagunov stood then turned to face the wall and pressed the keypad of his safe. ‘Enough. I’ve got euros and dollars. Euros are worth more right now so have them if you like. Fifty thousand to leave the case alone, agreed?’
She watched, hypnotised, as he pulled out bank-fresh bundles of notes and piled them on his desk.
Chapter 26
At reception she nodded a curt goodbye to Daria then waited until the lift doors had closed and Lagunov’s secretary had disappeared from view. A man with thinning hair and a briefcase brushed past her and swiped his card through a slot in the door to exit the building.
She took out her ID card but the red-haired receptionist waved it away. ‘You’re Oleg, right?’
‘Yes, Detective.’
‘Those things.’ She pointed at the slot by the door. ‘Do you have to use a pass to get in and out of the building?’
‘Unless I let you in.’
‘Do they record who uses them?’
‘On here.’ He lowered his head and she peered over his desk to see a blue screen in front of him.
She spoke sotto voce, ‘Oleg, this is confidential: Mister Lagunov thinks his wallet was stolen last Thursday evening. Can you check if his pass has been used?’
‘When?’
‘Friday morning. It’s possible he had it then but he’s not sure.’
‘The menti come out for a stolen wallet now?’
She spoke in a monotone as if the subject bored her. ‘It’s a new initiative: we crack down on street crime to stop petty thieves becoming bigger ones.’ She shook her head to suggest her superiors were idiots for thinking of it.
He fixed his concentration on the screen and pressed a few keys. ‘Anything else you need?’
‘No, thanks…Oleg.’ She patted her pockets. ‘I’ve left my phone upstairs.’
He took out a temporary pass and handed it to her, ‘You’d better take this.’
‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ She started walking away.
‘Wait…they are just coming now.’ He gathered several sheets of A4 paper from a printer and stapled them together. ‘This is everyone from Friday morning. Mister Lagunov’s code is C13284.’
‘Thanks.’
She took the papers and headed for the stairs, continuing until she reached the floor above Lagunov’s office. On the landing, she examined the sheets of A4, noting each had the same three columns: “ID Code”, “Entry Timestamp” and “Exit Timestamp”. She knelt and flicked through them until she saw the first occurrence of C13284. Taking out an old biro, she made a mark against Anatoly Lagunov’s ID Code then drew a line to find the corresponding time. It stopped on an entry timestamp of “07:05:37”. She checked the date to confirm Oleg had printed a log for the right date – he had.
It was disappointing but these things happened. Early on the Friday morning, Lagunov had gone to work half an hour before Lyudmila Kuznetsova reported seeing the grey-haired bureaucrat from her window. Sometimes, by being overly helpful, witnesses caused more trouble than those who kept quiet. The old woman’s hearing was clearly bad, maybe her eyesight was too.
To complete the task Natalya scrolled through the remaining pages. There was another instance of C13284 and she drew a fresh line to find the corresponding timestamp. It was “07:12:04”. She stared at the paper an
d smiled. Lagunov had been at work for less than seven minutes, barely enough time to establish an alibi by talking to a few early birds. Further down the list she found another C13284 and tracked it with her pen to see when he had returned: “10:15:48” – three hours later.
In Zena’s apartment, Leo Primakov had mimed a solvent being used to wipe the fingerprints from Zena’s light switches and door handles. Lagunov wasn’t a professional burglar, perhaps he had forgotten to bring gloves and had called in at the office, not to establish an alibi but to find a stationery cupboard and pick up one of those sprays used for cleaning dirty finger marks off computer screens.
The pass Oleg had given her came with a lanyard and she pushed it over her neck then ran her fingers through her hair. She found a toilet and reapplied her lipstick before tucking her checked shirt tightly in her skirt to pull out the creases. She hid her Makarov and handcuffs in her handbag and headed onto the office floor. There was an open-plan design segregated into six areas that were in turn divided into cubicles. A banner suspended from the ceiling displayed the name of a steel town in the Urals, another the name of Segezha, a prison town with a large paper mill.
She strolled to a coffee machine and watched a woman feeding coins into it. ‘Is this finance?’
The woman turned and Natalya saw that her upper lip was short, leaving her with a permanent pout. ‘Marketing. You need the second floor.’
‘Actually,’ Natalya dropped her voice and held out the temporary pass, ‘I’ve just started and the coffee there tastes like an unflushed toilet. I was hoping it might be better here.’
‘No chance of that,’ the woman said.
Natalya continued in a whisper. ‘As I said, I’ve just started and there’s a rumour that the company is being sold. No one will tell me anything and I don’t want to ask in case I get in trouble. Am I wasting my time here?’
The woman pressed a button for lemon tea. ‘That’s finance for you. I heard the deal was off.’
‘So my job is safe?’ Natalya looked relieved, ‘My husband works in offshore exploration. He’s stuck at home looking after the kids until the oil price goes up.’
The woman took her plastic cup from the machine then glanced around the room. ‘There were irregularities.’
Natalya leaned closer. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The buyer dropped out because the accounts didn’t balance’.
‘What do you mean?’ she repeated.
The woman’s eyes narrowed, ‘I thought you were in Finance?’
‘I’m admin.’
‘Well, everyone is talking about it…up here at least. Millions are missing. If you hear anything more, will you tell me? I’ve got kids too.’
Natalya screwed up her face to look pained. ‘Of course.’
She left the woman pouting and returned to the second floor, cutting a path between the accountants’ desks. Lagunov’s secretary had seen her and was making her way across the floor, ready to intercept her. ‘Daria, I need to speak with Anatoly. It’s urgent.’
‘Please wait there.’
Daria took a few paces to his inner office before Natalya brushed past her and burst in.
Lagunov whirled round. ‘Captain, what are you doing?’
He looked over her shoulder at the open door to his office and his secretary. ‘Daria, it’s fine,’ he said. ‘Please leave us.’
She heard the door close behind her.
‘Did you change your mind?’ he asked.
She frowned. ‘About the money? No’ – she shook her head for emphasis – ‘I don’t take bribes. I left something behind.’ She bent over the chair to retrieve her mobile from the side of the cushion. ‘I accidentally left it recording.’ She showed him the screen so he could see the moving bar of the voice recorder. She tapped the stop button.
‘Time to start talking.’ She put her palms flat on his desk.
‘You can keep recording us if it makes you feel better,’ he sneered. ‘I can even incriminate myself and it will make no difference, I assure you. Would you have taken more if I’d offered it?’
More than fifty thousand dollars? Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. ‘No.’
Lagunov shook his head slowly in disappointment. ‘Then let me give you some good fucking advice: visit your sister in Germany. This is bigger than you.’
She stared at him, too shocked to speak. Finally she found the words. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’
‘No, Captain. Where the hell do you think you are? This is Russia. The case is closed, don’t attempt to lift the lid.’
Mikhail, and now Lagunov. Two warnings in one day. One from State Security, which was insane to ignore; the other, from Dahl’s lawyer, which was more perplexing than anything else. She had enough to arrest him for the false alibi and attempted bribery except she could tell by his cockiness that it would backfire. Lagunov was one of those hard, clever men who would prove to be as slippery as a Baltic eel when she brought him to headquarters. And for what? Lying over an alibi for a case that was already with the prosecutor? Attempting to bribe her? Well, there were many in the department who saw bribes as a perk of the job and they would be furious if she caused mixed messages to be sent out.
‘You lied to me. You left the office almost as soon as you arrived. Why don’t you tell me what you were doing in Zena’s apartment on Friday morning?’
The lawyer sighed. ‘I know you are just doing your job but it’s of no concern to you.’
Natalya stared at him and felt an almost insatiable desire to slap him around the head. ‘What are you keeping from me, Lagunov?’ she shouted.
The lawyer was close enough for her to grab him by the collar. She did; he was as solid as a statue. ‘Tell me what’s going on.’
‘Control yourself. I’m helping you.’
She let go of Lagunov and watched him straighten his shirt. Her phone started ringing and she glanced at it to see Primakov’s name and the picture from his VK profile of him crossing the line at last year’s St. Petersburg Half Marathon. She answered it while glowering at the lawyer.
‘Leo, this is a bad time.’
In the background she heard a raw wind blowing and what sounded like a ship horn. ‘Sorry, Captain. I know it’s your day off but it’s important.’
‘Hold on, Leo.’
She held up a finger to Lagunov then stepped into Daria’s outer office.
‘OK, carry on.’
Primakov sounded breathless, ‘Major Dostoynov said you were off duty. He’s going to send someone else. He told me not to involve you.’
‘What is it, Leo?’
‘Well, can you come anyway? I’m just off Morskaya Naberezhnaya, there’s an old boatyard before the Petrovsky Fairway Bridge.’
‘I’m busy, Leo, why don’t you call later?’
‘It’s not that…Look, you need to see this. We’ve found a body. I think it’s connected to Zena Dahl’s murder.’
Chapter 27
Natalya turned off Morskaya Naberezhnaya at the north end of Vasilyevsky Island; the rough, compacted earth of the derelict boatyard soon forcing her to drive at a walking pace. Attached to a concrete post by heavy chains, a pair of German Shepherds stopped their intense sniffing of Primakov’s Samara to watch her with mild interest. She edged past them, and ten metres on saw an ancient Zhiguli police car parked next to a civilian hatchback with an unnecessary “Doctor on call” sign in the windscreen. The path narrowed, and what appeared to be sand dunes mutated before her eyes into banks of builder’s aggregate sprouting wild grass.
She stopped by a grey-blue amphibious troop carrier with a track missing that was losing its battle against the elements. To save explaining herself to the uniforms from the Zhiguli, she fixed her handcuffs and Makarov in place before walking down a cracked concrete lane. A grey sky hung overhead, threatening rain, and she had the strongest desire for a cigarette that she had felt in years. This, she thought, was a much better place to find a corpse.
Two menti were g
azing thoughtfully across the Malaya Neva river at the construction of the massive, half-finished, cable-stayed bridge to link the island with the tip of Krestovsky and then across the Bolshaya Neva to the mainland. Next to the policemen was a skinny, unkempt man with white hair who was sucking on a hand-rolled, broken exhaust of a cigarette.
She took out her notepad, ‘Did you call the police?’
The man jumped and twisted his head.
‘Me? Yes, I came here an hour ago to feed the dogs.’
‘You own this place?’
‘No.’ He stretched an arm in the direction of the two German Shepherds, ‘Kolya and Kazan do security. I look after the dogs.’ He rubbed two fingers together.
‘So not official. What did you see?’
‘I came by to feed them, also to take Kolya for a walk. He takes a shit at this time – there’s a spot by the river he likes. I saw a new mound of gravel. Kolya got excited and started digging at it…then I saw the hand.’
‘I’ll come to that. Tell me, when were you last here?’
‘Seven this morning. It wasn’t there then.’ He shifted the cigarette to a corner of his mouth.
‘How can you be sure?’
‘The landowner has a boat moored here. I check it every day at the same time.’
‘Thanks.’
One of the policeman standing near the dog owner glanced casually at her Makarov and handcuffs, then spent too long working his way up to her eyes.
‘Where is it?’ she asked.
‘Over there by the water with Grandfather Frost and the Snow Maiden.’ The policeman laughed to himself, and she smelled alcohol.
The Snow Maiden, Leo Primakov, was in his white, nylon oversuit taking pictures of the ground. Near his feet was Grandfather Frost, a grey-bearded doctor, who was pressing two fingers against the wrist of a hand poking from a low mound of gravel.
‘Dead?’ she asked.
The doctor looked up, seeing her for the first time, ‘As a Syrian peace negotiation.’
The two uniforms were still studying the bridge construction and she inserted her little fingers into the corners of her mouth and blew hard. The noise was piercing. ‘Hey, Holmes and Watson – Over here!’