by Ben Creed
‘Burette?’
‘Used by analytical chemists to dispense variable amounts of chemical solutions.’
Rossel gestured towards the tube.
‘May I?’
Dr Volkova nodded.
He whipped off his leather gloves and picked up a pair of white latex ones that were lying on the table. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the pathologist looking at him as he struggled to get them on; in the end he had to tug at them with his teeth to pull the flaccid tips over his crooked, clumsy fingers. Turning back, he lifted up the tube and examined it more closely.
‘Perhaps used to administer a drug?’ he asked.
‘It would be an unusual vessel. Besides, apart from blood and traces of sputum from the larynx, the tube does not contain any other substances. To me, it looks like it was made by a master craftsman at the Gusevskoi Crystal Factory, not churned out by a laboratory products machine. But your theory about a drug, at least, may have some substance. Our tattooed priest has a series of puncture marks around his left ankle. The same goes for the blue-top.’
Rossel rested the tube back on the metal tray. Then he removed the gloves.
‘You have been carrying out autopsies without informing me?’
Dr Volkova shook her head. ‘No. It is too soon. I was once present at an autopsy on a frozen body that had not been left to thaw for long enough. It was still solid in the middle. The pathologist persisted out of stubbornness but soon found it was like scraping out the icebox in a refrigerator.’
This was said with relish.
‘However, this case is unique so I have been taking a look every so often. There are pressure sores over the shoulder blades, buttocks and heels. Also, over some parts of the spine, and in some cases on one ankle.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Rossel.
‘Sores develop when a subject is kept immobile for long periods. The irregular pattern suggests confinement in an enclosed space, not necessarily on a flat surface such as a bed or stretcher. That, in turn, could imply sedation.’
‘They were drugged?’ Rossel’s eyebrows shot up. ‘What with?’
‘I cannot be sure. An obvious candidate from a medical point of view would be phenobarbital, a barbiturate. But an opiate would also do the job.’
‘Can they both cause death?’
‘Yes.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Rossel.
‘As I say, until I have done a . . .’
‘A proper examination, I know. Time is against us, Doctor. I need answers,’ snapped Rossel.
Volkova looked hurt.
‘Obviously, they all look thin. So, muscle wastage is certain and I expect to see loss of fat layers when I get down to business.’
‘Sedation and starvation. That would imply long, slow deaths. With the killer keeping a close eye on the gradual degradation of the victims.’
Dr Volkova flicked a switch and the desk lamp went out. The morgue felt instantly colder in the semi-darkness.
‘A murderer who first starves his victims, drugs them, then kills and mutilates them,’ she murmured. ‘An unusual modus operandi, don’t you think, Lieutenant? Abnormal, even for a maniac.’
She moved closer in the gloom.
‘We live in a city where only eight years ago they lifted a siege that killed close to a million people,’ Rossel said. ‘Where the cats had to wolf down the rats if they wanted to finish their breakfast before the citizens wolfed down both the cats, the rats and anything else still able to scurry through the bomb craters. Where some husbands ate their wives and some mothers dined on their own children. In those dark years, many people went well beyond normality. It would be no surprise to me if some of them never made it back.’
Dr Volkova turned away from him and stared down at the tube on the tray. She reached out and switched the lamp back on again. And then pointed to the thin curved glass lip at the pipe’s larger end.
‘My grandfather played in the Admiralty Navy band. Above his mantelpiece at home, next to his navy cap and a chest full of service medals, was a cornet. This looks like that.’
‘A cornet? You think our Snow Queen played the cornet in a navy band?’
‘No, of course not. It’s just the shape of this tube. It being like that makes me wonder if it has been designed to amplify some kind of sound.’
The cynical twinkle in Rossel’s steel-grey eyes faded.
‘What kind of sound?’
Dr Volkova thought for a moment. Then shrugged.
‘You’re right. I’m being foolish and seeing similarities that don’t exist. You know, Comrade Lieutenant, you are the music man, someone who studied violin at our famous conservatory. Destined for great things, so the rumours go.’
She glanced down at Rossel’s gloved hands.
‘The rumours, as it turns out, were correct,’ he said. ‘There can be no greater destiny than to serve the Soviet people, keep order in society and guard against counter-revolutionary tendencies.’
He picked up the glass tube. He held it close to the jagged end so the glass lip of the cylinder occupied the space between them. In the semi-darkness, it looked like a small flower that was about to bloom.
‘I don’t know about a sound, Dr Volkova. But whoever made this certainly intended it to amplify something.’
Volkova angled the lamp up so the beam shone through the tube, which now became a sinister prism casting a shimmering ripple of light; tiny fluorescent petals began to dapple the ceiling.
She frowned.
‘Amplify what, then?’
Rossel took a moment to consider his answer.
‘Fear. For the mind that conceived and manufactured this strange instrument, it is possible simple fear was not enough and only absolute terror would do.’
There was a sharp knock at the door. Rossel and Dr Volkova both stepped back from each other.
Junior Sergeant Taneyev’s grey face poked around the door. He was sweating at the temples; looking more agitated than usual.
‘The captain wants to see you, Comrade Lieutenant.’
‘I will be there in five minutes.’
‘No, I mean, sorry, but Captain Lipukhin was most insistent. He said now.’
Rossel handed the tube back to the doctor and picked up his cap from the table.
‘Trouble?’
Taneyev nodded. ‘It’s Gerashvili, Comrade Lieutenant.’
‘Gerashvili?’
‘The captain says she has gone. That she’s missing.’
‘Missing?’
‘Yes, since yesterday. She never returned from that high-class jeweller in Passazh.’
Rossel put on his cap and twisted the rim a half a centimetre to the right so it was perfectly centred.
‘I’ll take a car and go to her apartment. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation. It’s unlikely she been abducted by foreign agents, Sergeant.’
Taneyev took a grey handkerchief from his pocket and wiped some of the sweat from his brow.
‘No, Comrade Lieutenant. The captain doesn’t think she’s been abducted, either.’
‘Well, then.’
‘He thinks she’s been arrested.’
11
Thursday October 18
A thin winter sunlight was seeping from behind two bili-ous clouds. On both sides of Nevsky Prospect, lines of shop girls and office workers bumped and jostled each other in fur coats, scarves and hats as they competed to get home from work before yet more snow fell, as the radio had warned. As their car sped past the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism, Rossel stared out of the passenger window through the rain towards the brightly lit glass globe on top of the House of Books. His mother had bought him a biography of Rimsky-Korsakov from there for his birthday – his thirteenth? There was a grainy photograph of the composer in its middle pages. Dark eyes stared out through small round glasses. They were the eyes of a detective, he remembered thinking – shrewd and penetrating. Lieutenant Rimsky-Korsakov. Perhaps the good comrade c
omposer could help him solve this case. He certainly did not feel up to it on his own.
And now Gerashvili was missing.
Lipukhin spun the wheel and pulled the car into a side street at the back of Passazh department store. The captain’s face was even pinker than usual. He must have upped his vodka ration – he had been reading Pravda’s article about the ‘Season of Traitors!’ just before the news of Gerashvili’s disappearance came through.
Both men jumped out of the car and stood side by side in the busy street. Rossel cupped his gloved hands to guard the flame from his match and lit a cigarette, an Elbrus.
‘Nothing seemed different when I went to her apartment,’ he said. ‘She shares it with a couple of nurses from Hospital 40 in Sestroretsk. Except, of course, that she wasn’t there.’
‘She’s been missing since yesterday morning,’ said Lipukhin, ‘when she went out to pick up the sales ledgers as you had requested. She signed out of the station at 10.35 and never signed back in. It was nearly the weekend so Sergeant Taneyev just assumed that she was as administratively incompetent as him and would arrive back all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning.’
‘But Gerashvili is always punctilious.’
‘Exactly so.’
‘You have had official notification of an arrest, Captain?’ asked Rossel.
‘No, I have not.’
‘Then what makes you so certain?’
Lipukhin turned his head to the right and nodded towards the doorway of a shop. Rossel followed him. Opposite them stood the wire shelves of a newspaper kiosk, each stacked high with copies of Pravda, sweets for children and cigarettes. A headline in Trud, the union newspaper, caught his eye.
MORE ARRESTS OF TRAITOROUS ELEMENTS. Comrade Beria calls for unrelenting vigilance against counter-revolutionary conspirators.
‘I rang our beloved MGB comrades of the Bolshoi Dom first thing this morning to report her disappearance, as you would expect,’ said Lipukhin.
‘And?’
‘Someone took my call and made a note of the incident but otherwise did not react. Even in a week like this one, it’s not every day a junior sergeant of the militia goes missing.’
‘No.’
‘He didn’t sound at all surprised. He knew exactly where our girl is. I can feel it in my gut.’
‘The cells of the Bolshoi Dom?’
Lipukhin nodded and pointed to the doors of Passazh.
‘I think you and Gerashvili must have upset some very important people when you went to see your friend Djilas in there.’
Rossel dropped his cigarette butt onto the slushy pavement and ground it under the heel of his boot.
‘Let’s go and upset that stuck-up prick a little bit more then, shall we?’
The captain hesitated, but Rossel was determined.
‘Or you could leave this entirely to me, Comrade Captain. Like you said yesterday.’
Captain Lipukhin’s cheeks went almost rouge.
‘Watch yourself, Lieutenant. That was then. I can hardly step back from a case that involves the disappearance of one of my own team. It would be a gross dereliction of duty.’ The captain sighed and nodded. ‘Anyway, Djilas must be a Serb. Foreign name. I never did like Serbs. Treacherous bastards.’
Lipukhin sounded calm but, as he adjusted his cap, his fingers were quivering.
*
When they arrived in front of the jewellers, the metal shutters were pulled down and the neon sign switched off. Comrade Djilas’s oiled moustache and his sparkling trinkets were nowhere to be seen. Rossel and Lipukhin looked around the almost empty arcade. A middle-aged woman with the wrinkled face of an eighty-cigarettes-a-day smoker and erratically dyed red hair peeping out from under her knitted headscarf was closing up a flower shop two doors down.
They walked towards her.
‘Djilas, Comrade Djilas, the jeweller, have you seen him today?’
‘No, not today,’ she said. ‘Not since yesterday when they took him.’
‘They?’
She looked first at Lipukhin, then at Rossel and sniffed a couple of times, as though she didn’t much like what she saw.
‘Not your lot. These had blue hats with steel stars on them, and much shinier boots.’
Lipukhin glanced down at his left boot. There was a splattering of mud on it.
‘State security, then?’ he said.
She pulled down the shutter and twisted a rusty key in a padlock to close it. Then stood up, pushing the dark roots of her hair back under the scarf as she did so.
‘Like I say, shinier shoes.’
*
Taneyev was stuffing his face with sauerkraut and sausage, shovelled down with the aid of a clump of black bread that he dropped back onto the plate as soon he saw them walking into the office. He jumped up, looking agitated – looking old.
‘Where’s Grachev?’ Lipukhin demanded.
‘Gone, Comrade Captain. He grabbed his coat and just left about two hours ago. He didn’t say where.’
‘Any sign of Dr Volkova?’
‘She is in the morgue, Captain.’
Lipukhin swivelled on his heel and slammed the door behind him. Taneyev turned towards Rossel.
‘More trouble, Comrade Lieutenant? I can’t stop with the sauerkraut and sausage this week. I get that way when things get tense around here. And then there’s all this stuff in the papers about . . .’
Taneyev’s voice trailed away. ‘And why is the captain so angry?’
Rossel took off his coat and hung it on a hat stand near the fireplace with the carved wrought-iron seabird on it. Then he grabbed the chair from Grachev’s desk, turned it around and sat down opposite Taneyev.
‘The captain is angry, comrade, because he has decided to take charge of this case and become a proper policeman again. For now, at least.’
‘Oh,’ said Taneyev. ‘And how is the case progressing?’
‘The jeweller from Passazh, the one Gerashvili went to see, has gone, just like her. So, now we have five bodies, a missing junior sergeant and a witness who has vanished like a rabbit in a cheap magician’s hat. Arrested, most probably. Like Gerashvili.’
Taneyev swallowed.
‘Do you think they’ll . . .?’
Rossel took another stumpy Elbrus out of his jacket pocket and wondered how many he’d had that day. He lit it anyway.
‘I don’t think, Junior Sergeant. Not about things like that.’
‘It’s just – I have a daughter, sir. A son, too. A talented boy. Zenit are looking at him. I want to spend my retirement watching him play football, not . . .’
He tailed off again. There was a tear in his eye.
Rossel got up and walked towards the fireplace.
‘Then I suggest you try this.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Taneyev. ‘I don’t understand.’
Rossel beckoned and the sergeant stepped towards him. Rossel tapped the faded metal bird with the tip of the middle finger of his left hand.
‘My father told me once that luck was not worth the worship she got from desperate gamblers as she was more of a “reactionary bourgeois slut”, distributing her favours to the few and not the many. Both capricious and elitist, which is a tricky combination. On occasions, those days and weeks when I, too, am nervous, I try to placate her nevertheless.’
Taneyev looked at the bird. Then glanced at Rossel’s twisted hands.
‘Are you sure it works?’
‘It has to be worth a try, Comrade Sergeant. I’m still here, at any rate.’
When Taneyev had joined the militia, it had been a revolutionary mob in uniform – brutalised children with no homes to go to, proletarians settling scores with their one-time bosses, peasants with an astounding capacity for violence. Three decades had professionalised it to a very limited degree. Who knew what Taneyev had seen over the years? Who knew what he had already done to survive?
The ageing sergeant stared at the fireplace, mesmerised.
‘What
sort of bird is it?’ he asked
‘No idea,’ said Rossel.
Taneyev nodded and wiped his eyes, as if that made all the sense he needed it to make, and everything had become clear.
‘I have a name for you, Comrade Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘A name on one of the females – the blue-hat. I’ve been through all the available missing persons reports and perhaps, I think, maybe, I have a match that might fit her.’
Rossel’s smile was a thin one.
‘Perhaps, I think . . . maybe. Such confidence. And you wait until now to tell me?’
Taneyev bowed his head.
‘Give me the file anyway,’ said Rossel. ‘I’ll take a look.’
He gestured towards the fireplace.
‘But first, being capricious and a little bourgeois, the lady demands her payment.’
Taneyev handed Rossel the manila file, before reaching out a hand towards the tarnished seabird.
Rossel opened the file and stared down at the face of a chubby blonde-haired woman.
‘Nadya?’ he mumbled to himself.
He looked up at Taneyev but it was too late – he had given himself away.
The file slipped from his hand and spilled papers onto the floor. Hurriedly, he bent down to pick them up.
The old sergeant looked like he was going to be sick.
‘You know her, Lieutenant? You know our victim?’
‘Not know. Knew. She was no more than an acquaintance, really.’
Even to Rossel, it sounded like a lie. As though he was already rehearsing how he might answer the first question of his next Bolshoi Dom interrogation. Aiming for nonchalance. But, just as everyone did, failing.
12
In the photograph in the file, her face was not quite how Rossel remembered it. Nadya was fatter around the cheeks and neck. Her hair was dyed blonde and worn in a bun pinned tight to the scalp. She must have been one of the countless millions of Soviet women who had seen Tamara Markova in The Stone Flower and copied the look. ‘Majestic Markova. Seen for the very first time in glorious colour!’ is what the posters outside the cinemas had said. That’s just what Nadya would have done, he thought. She’d always had her heart set on being somebody important.