by Ben Creed
‘Is the killer’s method of starvation and sedation supported in this case, too?’ said Rossel.
‘Indeed,’ the pathologist replied. ‘Pressure sores, lack of fat, nothing in the gastrointestinal tract, muscles showing signs of wasting – all that is the case here. My tests reveal the presence of an opiate rather than a barbiturate but confirm sedation. Also, can you smell?’
He took a sniff in spite of himself. Yes, a faint whiff.
‘Pear, just like you said.’
Dr Volkova nodded. ‘Eau de Bone. The aroma of pear would be clearer if you came closer but perhaps that is inadvisable. The smell was particularly clear when I depressed her lungs. It is the smell of acetone – a ketone, which is produced when your body runs out of glucose and burns fat. It is found in higher concentrations in people who have been starved. Anyone who worked in a morgue during the siege would be very familiar with it.’
Rossel swallowed hard. In an effort to distract himself from the body, he found himself staring fixedly at the doctor’s full, red and slightly quivering lips.
At last!
His fingers closed around the box of matches in his pocket. He took them out and went through the complicated, two-handed process of extracting a lone match from the box that he could manoeuvre into position to strike. Two went on the floor before match, matchbox and cigarette were all where they needed to be.
His eyes pleaded. ‘She wasn’t conscious then? An opiate, you say.’
‘I’m afraid I cannot be certain. There is certainly evidence of haemorrhaging when the face was removed.’
‘Could that not have been done later?’
Dr Volkova lowered her eyes. ‘No. Doing all that to a frozen corpse is not possible. All the mutilations must have taken place shortly after death. Or . . . shortly before.’
The pathologist went over to her desk and returned with a piece of paper.
‘These are the basic details. Height, hundred and seventy centimetres. Hair colour, black. Age, early to mid-thirties. Unfortunately, with a frozen body it is very difficult to estimate time of death.’
Rossel took the paper and thanked her.
Dr Volkova reached out and took Rossel’s cigarette from his lips. Then took two quick nerve-steadying puffs and returned it to him.
‘I heard Captain Lipukhin call this one the Snow Queen,’ she said, reaching down to smooth a crinkle in the lapel of her uniform.
‘A joke. Of a sort.’
‘Do you know the fairy tale?’
Rossel nodded. ‘A little. Something about a magic mirror?’
‘Yes, a devil and his magic mirror,’ said Dr Volkova. ‘A mirror that distorted the reflection of everyone who looked into it, magnifying all that was ugly and hiding everything beautiful.’ She began working at the crinkle in her blouse now, he noticed. Hardly looking up at him.
‘It shattered, the mirror shattered, and its tiny shards were blown all over the world and into the eyes and the hearts and the minds of men and women, boys and girls, everywhere. “Freezing the fragile hearts of all Mother Russia’s children,” is the phrase my babushka used when she would recite the tale to us little ones.’
Dr Volkova dropped her hand and glanced up at him.
‘They froze their hearts,’ she said, ‘those poisonous shards, freezing them – just like our Snow Queen’s, here, has been – and making all around see only ugliness.’
She sighed.
‘I think she was pretty, this one. Not a head-turner, perhaps. But beautiful of soul. Sometimes, I have noticed, they are the ones men obsess about more than any other. A certain type of man, anyway.’
Rossel tried to make his voice sound unconcerned but failed.
‘She doesn’t look so good right now, Doctor. I fail to see how you can reach such a conclusion,’ he said.
Dr Volkova studied him.
‘Not by looking at her, comrade. By looking at you. Your hands are trembling and I’ve never seen you so pale.’
22
Thursday October 25
Time ticked away with every clack of the train’s wheels.
After a couple of stops, a little girl of about ten got on with her mother. They sat opposite Rossel. One of the girl’s legs was missing and her face was scarred. The mother, without being prompted, blamed the girl’s misfortunes on a German incendiary bomb. Soon she was in full flow about her wartime misfortunes and the punishments that should be visited for all eternity on the German people, the way it was a disgrace that half the country had got away with it. The girl kept silent, glum and embarrassed, so Rossel took off his left glove and showed her the two stumps, with their smooth white tips, where fingers should be. She stared at them without any sign of being impressed until he mimed playing the piano and pulled the stupidest face he could, which elicited a giggle, though the mother did not join in. By the time the train reached his stop, he and the girl had bonded, if not healed, and he had decided to feel a little less sorry for himself.
The journey was brought to a halt by the river, which barred the way to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Estonia. On the Russian side was Ivangorod; on the other lay its twin town, Narva. Both had their fortresses, medieval structures that glowered at each other over the dark water. A rusty bridge yoked the two scruffy settlements together. If Sofia really had been a fairy-tale queen, he thought, then this seemed the perfect place for some ogre to imprison her.
It was easy to find Ivangorod’s police station, a squat, red-brick building in the shadow of the town’s castle. Rossel walked up the stone steps and went in.
Lieutenant Yuri Shumilov was amicable enough towards an equal from the big city but gave the impression of a man who had other things to do, though in an outpost this sleepy it was hard to imagine what that might be.
‘Here is her regional file, Lieutenant. Sofia Semyonovna Fedotova. We collected some items from the room she was staying in when she was first reported missing – letters, drawings, bills, her work permit.’
Rossel wondered if it was possible to get a transfer to somewhere like this – somewhere well out of the way, where no one got to bother you with corpses on railway lines.
‘There are also some volumes of poetry, a sketchbook and a couple of photographs, all in this bag,’ continued Shumilov. ‘There is no next of kin we have been able to find. Do you know of any? The clothes are in a package and will be donated to factory workers. The papers I thought you might want to look at. Feel free to take them, I don’t want them anymore.’
Rossel looked around the station at the three other militia officers leafing through meaningless paperwork and realised that a transfer would be a mistake. The biggest killer out here was boredom.
The radio was on. A staccato, patriotic march, indistinguishable from all the others, crashed to a close and a voice brimming with enthusiasm announced the broadcasting of a speech by ‘our dearest, greatest leader, the great architect of Communism, General-Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Our beloved Stalin.’
Over the radio came a soft but unmistakable voice, a pleasant tenor with a light Georgian accent, greeting delegates from the republics of the Soviet Union and from communist parties around the world to the forthcoming celebrations.
Shumilov and his colleagues froze.
‘Comrades,’ crackled the general-secretary’s voice. ‘The entire country is celebrating this meeting, the first Congress since our victory over Nazi Germany, Japan, and other fascistic powers in the Great Patriotic War. Since 1945, new fronts have opened against new enemies who wish to see our achievements in culture, science, society and other peaceful endeavours crushed. Yet we have prevailed thanks to the unity of the communist fraternity, at home and abroad. We have . . .’
Shumilov glanced at Rossel. Both men got hurriedly to their feet and stood to attention; the other three militia officers did the same.
‘. . . imperialist ambitions to undermine us, to sabotage us, to provoke us into disunity
and strife, emerging with glory into a new age of prosperity and happiness. Yet we must remain as vigilant as ever against the snakes and devils of the capitalist exploiters and fifth columnists. They, and all traitors who offer them help, must be annihilated without pity for the good of the state.’
Stalin rarely spoke with anger in his voice. Since the war, indeed, he had made fewer and fewer speeches, and when he did, he sounded pragmatic and downbeat, as if he were announcing that month’s agricultural production figures.
There was no mistaking the venom behind his words now.
‘We must cut out the infected parts of the Party to save it from illness. We will march onwards, under the flag of Lenin, with the guidance of Marx, trampling underfoot those who dare to stand in our way. Traitors, wreckers and fifth columnists – we must be ever vigilant. Do not hesitate to strike in the forthcoming campaign to root out our enemies, wherever they may be lurking. Do not fear to give your assistance to the guardians of Bolshevism. Find the Trotskyites. Unearth the counter-revolutionary doctors plotting against our government. Isolate and destroy the conspirators. For, as you learned during the war against the fascist Hitlerite aggressor – and as we see again with the imperialist ambitions of the United States and her lackeys in Europe – nothing can be taken for granted, and no perfidious so-called ally can be trusted.’
Rossel stared at the wooden walls of the police station, not daring even a sideways look. Better to die in the line of duty than of boredom. But better still not to die at all.
When the speech ended, Lieutenant Shumilov cried out, ‘Three cheers for our beloved Stalin!’ and everyone in the station clapped furiously, bellowing their hurrahs, smiling in rapture. Their applause rang on and on for three, four, five minutes – with a stranger in their ranks no one dared to be the first to cease. Only when Shumilov at last cried out, ‘Comrades, a toast to the great and mighty Stalin!’ and pulled out a bottle of vodka from somewhere under his desk did they rest their stinging hands.
You had to admire the lieutenant’s thinking – the only way to safely stop applauding Stalin was to start toasting him.
*
Rossel opened the file and stared at her photograph once again. Sofia Fedotova. Age thirty-four. Born down the road in Kingissyepp, educated at school number twenty-two and then at the special music college, before winning a place at the opera faculty of the Leningrad Conservatory. Spent most of 1942 working as an ambulance nurse in the city before being evacuated to Kazakhstan.
But he knew all that. What he didn’t know was what had happened to her after the war.
She had returned to Leningrad but by August 1946 she had moved here, to Ivangorod, mopping floors and emptying bedpans, apparently having made no attempt to continue as a singer.
‘She went missing in late July of this year, according to her co-workers at the polyclinic,’ said Shumilov. He had a faint Baltic edge to his speech and, despite the Russian name, Rossel thought he was probably an ethnic Estonian. ‘She said she was going to Leningrad to meet a friend and never returned.’
‘Where is the polyclinic?’ asked Rossel.
‘Over the river. Here and in Narva, many of us work in one town and live in the other. This Sofia woman of yours lived in a kommunalka on the Ivangorod side – the address is in the file. Go if you want but they have already found someone else to live in her old apartment.’
Rossel looked up.
‘So soon?’
His opposite number shrugged. ‘Small town, too many people. Living space is not easy to come by. Word gets around fast. Besides, she hadn’t been there for months – people were getting impatient, there’s always a queue.’
There were three unfinished letters to friends – a few small moans about her work, mocking remarks about doctors trying to get her into bed, an account of a week’s holiday in Tallinn. All three were less than a page long and who knew why she had kept but not finished them. Her work record was almost completely blank – no commendations, no complaints.
Rossel turned to the books, lifting them in twos and threes out of the bag. Pushkin, Lermontov and Baratynsky. Nothing controversial – nobody had yet outlawed Pushkin. ‘Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths.’ She had always loved the poet’s line from The Hero, declaiming it one night as they walked back from a concert just as an air-raid siren started up. There was not a trace of fear in her voice, he remembered.
Last of all was a green, leather-bound sketchbook. Rossel leafed through, past trees, cats, street scenes, drawings of the meandering River Narva. A grand, domed building he did not recognise, like a nineteenth-century country estate belonging to an aristocrat. She had sketched this three times from different angles.
Now came an interior drawing. Behind a bed was a table and a vase. Scattered around were a few playing cards, not a complete deck, not even a complete suit. At the foot of the bed was something else: a musical score with a couple of notes drawn on it. There was writing on the score where the title should be – Thanatos and H . . . something. The second word was unfinished.
And then a drawing unlike all the others. A shadowy presence lying on the side of the bed, sheets tangled about it. Rossel stared down at the hatching on the page but could make out no discernible features. He could only just be certain the prone figure was human.
Sofia had been an accomplished rather than a brilliant artist but somehow this drawing had an intensity, a meaning that the others lacked, as if it was rooted in personal experience, not mere observation or imagination.
There was something else too.
A second erratic scribbling. A crude attempt to deface the first image. The pen pressing so deep it had torn a small hole into the paper.
Whoever this shadow was, she was petrified of them. The certainty of this drove a cold blade through him from his throat to his guts.
*
Rossel crossed the bridge into Narva to looks of indifference from the guards and one lazy, semi-insolent salute. Shumilov had written him a pass to get over the bridge and the nominal border separating Russia from the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. The town might have been in a different country but there was no need to learn the language: everybody here was either Russian or spoke Russian.
When he got to the polyclinic, he stopped any nurse he could find of about Sofia’s age. The third one he asked, a careworn thirty-year-old with short dark hair and boyish features, knew her. Yes, she said, we were friends but Sofia was elusive. She didn’t like to talk about herself too much.
‘What did she do out of work hours?’ asked Rossel.
‘Oh, I don’t really know,’ said the nurse. ‘She lived on the other side. But she sang at workers’ canteens sometimes, she got some extra money that way. She had a beautiful voice – she was classically trained, you know. But she gave that all up.’
‘Did she ever say why?’
‘Yes, once, she did,’ said the nurse. ‘She was in Leningrad, during the blockade. All of that horror’ – and here the woman paused to flick the fingers of one hand as if warding off flies from a plate of jam, a gesture apparently intended to convey the months of slaughter and misery – ‘left a scar. Inside, I mean. We got drunk together, once – the only time. And she blurted it out. “You cannot sing all that, you cannot express that. A genius could, perhaps, but why would they want to?” She was crying. Which was unlike her. So, she had run away from Leningrad. It must have been bad for her in the war to come here of all places. Do you know where she is now, Lieutenant?’
‘Yes,’ said Rossel. ‘Did she ever talk about any family or any relationships?’
‘Her mother and father were killed in the Great Patriotic War. All the doctors,’ added the nurse in lower tones, ‘all the doctors wanted to be with her. But they are all either too married or too old. Not suitable. She never found anyone, I believe – not anyone that she talked of, anyway. She still looked after herself though, you know, spent money on her lovely long dark hair. Too much, in my opinion.’
‘No one else?’ asked Rossel. ‘Are you sure?’
The nurse thought. ‘Before she finally went away, she mentioned meeting up with an old friend in Leningrad. That was odd, you know? She never went back there, never said much about the rest of her time there. But one day someone had got in touch and she seemed very happy about it at first. I could tell when she was happy because she got a little more talkative. When she was upset, she went very, very quiet. She ended up going to see whoever it was a few times, I think. But it didn’t end well.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I bumped into her one day. Asked her how it was going. She just looked sullen. Wouldn’t say a thing . . . Is she in trouble? I hope not. Girls like that, ones who men lust after in that particular way, romantically. Pretending they are all poets, right up to the moment they first unbuckle their pants. Well, it’s my experience that they don’t have to go searching for heartache. It just comes to them. Poor Sofia, she would never have gone looking for trouble, herself. I’m sure of it.’
23
It was past six o’clock before the train from Ivangorod chugged to a halt back in Leningrad’s Baltic Station. Rossel leapt from his carriage and hurried to catch a tram that would take him to Theatre Square.
As he looked through the tram window, he saw the first flakes of a renewed snowfall tumble through the light of the street lamps. He began to hear Stalin’s voice again – his tired mind was playing tricks on him, he thought. He listened carefully. No, it was real – the great leader was still exhorting him to be vigilant against spies, wreckers, counter-revolutionary rightists and capitalist vampires. Just as he had been on the radio in Ivangorod.
Rossel pressed his nose against the glass and looked up. On lampposts and buildings, he could see loudhailers that hadn’t been there yesterday, nestled among the flags and banners, hailing the forthcoming celebrations. Not long ago, more loudhailers on the lampposts had signified national crisis; now they prepared the populace for a national triumph. Though sometimes the two went hand in hand, as the populace knew well.