A Spring Betrayal (6 page)

“I’ve seen a lot of shit that people do to each other, Akyl,” he said, and I watched the burning end of his cigarette tremble, as if caught in a sudden wind. I waited for him to speak. From a man who’d spent so much time in the presence of the dead, his silence told me more than I wanted to know.

“He was about twelve, I guessed, but hard to tell from the bruising on his face and chest. Small, undernourished, thin enough so I could see the broken ribs outlined against his skin. The left cheekbone shattered, so his face had collapsed in on itself. Two teeth on the right side slicing through his cheek. His facial injuries came from a hammer; I could see the circular imprint.”

Usupov paused, snapped his fingers to drag the receptionist away from her phone.

“Vodka, the good stuff,” he said. I shook my head, watched the girl walk away. We waited in silence until an open bottle and brimming glass sat in front of him. Usupov emptied the glass in one swift movement, shuddered as the alcohol blazed in his mouth and throat.

“Go on,” I said, quietly, not wanting to break Usupov’s rhythm.

“Bite marks—from more than one mouth—on the boy’s thighs. A compound fracture of the left tibia. And bruising from what looked like heavy boots. Not just kicking but stamping, so I could see the tread on the soles. More than one pair of shoes.”

He poured more vodka, watched it spill over the lip of the glass.

“All the time I was examining the body, the man watched without a reaction. I might have been preparing dinner. Then I turned the body over.”

Usupov emptied the glass in a single shot.

“He’d been raped, Inspector, by more than one man, from the amount of sperm I found. Penetrated with something sharp. There was blood on the back of his legs, more bite marks on his shoulders. Twelve, Inspector, that’s how young he was. The same age as my eldest.”

I said nothing. There are times when the dead bear witness to such horror that silence is the only possible alternative to a scream of despair. I pushed the thought of a vodka for myself to one side. The clock continued to tick, like a pulse refusing to give up.

“The man said, ‘I told you, a heart attack,’ and he stood up, mashed his cigarette out on the floor. It left a blue-black mark on the tiles, the same shade as the bruises on the boy’s face. The man stood in front of me, the tobacco on his breath heavy on my face. He had a killer’s cold eyes, black, impossible to read. He held up a crumpled piece of paper, pushed it against my chest.

“‘The boy’s death certificate. I’ve saved you the trouble of filling it in. Heart attack. Mitral stenosis. It says so in black and white,’ he said, ‘and if it bothers you, well, his isn’t the only blank death certificate I have. Understand?’

“I asked if the body was to be released to relatives, and he told me not to bother my head with things that didn’t concern me. ‘Concentrate on slicing up the dead,’ he said. ‘And avoid joining them.’”

Usupov stared at the wall, not seeing anything, and we sat in silence.

“What makes you suspect there’s a connection to the case we have here?” I asked.

“You saw the bodies we autopsied,” Kenesh said. “There were bite marks on some of them. Blows from a hammer. Similar wounds. Done in a frenzy, maybe rage, maybe sexual, I don’t know.”

“So you think there’s a serial killer responsible for this?”

“More than one, judging from the boy’s body,” Kenesh said. “He’d been raped many times.”

“Can you check the wounds and see if they correspond?”

“Not with the dead boy. I wasn’t allowed to take photographs, and the body was taken away, God knows where. But there’s one thing I haven’t told you.”

“What’s that?” I asked, sensing that Usupov might be able to give me my first solid lead.

“The dead boy wore an identity band. From an orphanage.”

I sat back as his words started twisting new patterns and theories in my head.

“So what happened then?” I prompted.

Usupov looked at me for the first time. The fear and shame in his eyes was almost too much to watch.

“God forgive me, Akyl,” he said. “The man handed me the false death certificate. And I signed.”

Chapter 10

I decided to call Gurminj Shokhumorov, to see if he had any knowledge of local people with an unhealthy interest in children. Orphanages are often targeted by pedophiles; it’s a lot easier to pick out children who don’t have loving parents to care and watch over them, and fewer people care when they disappear.

His cell phone rang, but went to voicemail, so I decided to head over there. The mountains crouched behind a mask of rain, the air damp and cold. I kept trying Gurminj’s phone, and I grew more worried each time I pressed the redial button. A police car was parked at an angle outside the building when I arrived, and I knew something was badly wrong. As I got out of the car and approached the front entrance, a
ment
I didn’t recognize held up his hand to stop me.

“Crime scene. You can’t enter here,” he said, in the pompous voice all small men use when they’re in charge.

“What sort of crime?” I asked, the feeling of doom settling in my stomach.

“Police business,” he replied, put his hand on my chest to prevent me going any further. My jacket swung open, and I made sure he saw
the butt of my gun on my hip. He gasped, started to reach for his own gun. I grabbed his wrist, held it tight, pulling him toward me.

“I’m Murder Squad,” I told him, staring past the fear and suspicion in his eyes, “so police business is my business,
da
?”

I used my other hand to fish my ID out of my pocket, held it in front of his nose. The fear left his face, the suspicion remained.

“I didn’t know, Inspector,” he muttered, as I let go of his wrist. “I was told to keep the scene intact, not let anybody through.”

“Okay, bad beginning,” I said. “We both forget this. We start again, Officer . . . ?”

“Kurmanov,” he said, taking a step back, holding out his hand. We shook, awkward, unwilling to admit how close we’d come to a problem of our own making.

“I’m here to see the orphanage director, Gurminj Shokhumorov,” I said.

Kurmanov looked puzzled, then wary.

“How did you know, to get here so quickly?” he asked. “We only found the body half an hour ago.”

The director’s office was still lined with the tidemark of children’s shoulders, and the president continued to glare down from the wall behind the director’s desk. But now a splash of red paint had stippled the patterned wallpaper, and dripped from the glass of the picture frame. Except it wasn’t paint.

Gurminj Shokhumorov lay face down upon the papers scattered on his desk. Spilled red ink stained his hair and bare arms, and pooled a few inches away from his head. Except it wasn’t ink.

I could smell cordite, blood, and brains, the singed hair blackened around the wound, where the bullet had worked hard to drain his skull. The room was silent, holding its breath in shock. Gurminj’s desk calendar had all his appointments and meetings circled in red, now overlaid with a deeper scarlet already turning black. The gun, a Makarov, lay on the floor just behind his chair.

A uniformed officer was idly sifting through the papers on Gurminj’s desk, looking up as I entered. I held up my ID, playing the big
city Murder Squad guy, and his nervous fingers touched the peak of his cap.

“This is a crime scene. Don’t touch anything until the forensic pathologist’s inspected the body.”

“It’s a suicide, sir,” the
ment
said, holding up a paper. “Even left a note.”

“Which bit of ‘Don’t touch anything’ did I not make clear? Contaminating a crime scene could earn you a bunk in Penitentiary Number One, officer.”

The
ment
dropped the paper as if it had suddenly caught fire. I jabbed my thumb at the door.

“And shut it behind you,” I ordered as he headed out of the room. I walked over to the desk, the smell of blood and shit getting stronger. I’ve always wondered how despair could so overpower a person that death seemed better than any alternative. Even after Chinara had died, I didn’t consider killing myself. Maybe I had too much guilt and remorse not to serve the full life sentence due to me. Perhaps every death seems like a betrayal to those of us left behind.

I used a pencil on the desk to turn Gurminj’s note, and read it. The words were barely legible, quickly scribbled down.

Akyl, enough. I want it to end here. I can’t answer is why. I honestly don’t know. You said balance is overrated; believe me, you should weigh everything, because balance is where answers might be found. G

I tucked the paper in my pocket, looked once more around the room. A framed degree certificate from the American University of Central Asia, next to a row of photos, showing Gurminj with his wife, Oksana, eating
pelmeni
in the local restaurants, hiking through Ala Archa National Park, walking holding hands along Chui Prospekt, Oksana’s long black hair hurled upward by the wind. I never knew Oksana; she had died in a car accident the year before I met Gurminj. The loss had almost destroyed him, driving him into his work at the orphanage to fill the hole in his world.

I turned as a senior officer from the station entered the room.

“Our pathologist is on his way, then we can move the body,” he said. “If that’s okay with you.”

I nodded, and took a photo down from the wall. Gurminj, head thrown back, roaring with laughter, surrounded by the smiling orphans he’d cared for, encouraged, given a home they’d never known in their uncertain childhood. For Gurminj, I knew balance was everything. Which made me certain about how he had died.

A single tear-shaped fleck of blood smeared the glass. I wiped it away with my thumb, added the photo to the note in my pocket.

“That’s good,” I said, and gritted my teeth. “I want a complete report from the officer who found him. And you might ask yourself how the director put a bullet in the right side of his head, being as he only had a left arm.”

Chapter 11

Even as I let myself into Gurminj’s spartan apartment with the keys I’d found in his desk, I could tell the place had already settled into a sense of loss. I touched the side of the half-empty bowl of
chai
on the kitchen table. Cold, to be rinsed out and forgotten. Time, for all its uncertainties, doesn’t linger when we die.

It was clear to me that whoever had killed my friend wasn’t too bothered about making it look like a convincing suicide. Probably relying on the stupidity or indifference of the local officers. And that was maybe a clue in itself.

I sat down and looked around the room, open as to what I might find. Clues to a murder are usually all too evident; the bloody knife, broken bottle, bruised throat. But sometimes you have to stare, unthinking, simply letting the scene whisper its secrets. You have to hear the full confession before you can start to separate truth from the lies.

The apartment was almost obsessively tidy, the bed neatly made, plates washed and stacked on the sink. Three chairs stood shoulder to shoulder against the far wall, a table with neatly piled paperwork, a battered coffee can holding pens and pencils.

In the bedroom, the half-empty wardrobe housing a dozen unused clothes hangers was a reminder of Oksana’s absence, of the same emptiness in my own home. A well-thumbed copy of Chyngyz Aitmatov’s
The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years
lay open on the bedside table. Not when it’s your last day, I thought, and closed the book. A torn sliver of paper, used as a bookmark, fell from between the pages. I recognized Gurminj’s handwriting; a single word:
balance
.

Between life and death? Good and evil? Sweet and sour? No way of knowing. I remembered our final conversation, and the note Gurminj left behind. But nothing in my life was in balance. Everything was slightly off, a badly hung door that sticks when you try to close it, a window that never quite latches. I checked the jackets in the wardrobe, rummaged through the drawer of the bedside table, lifted the thin mattress. Nothing.

Back in the main room, I leafed through the papers on the table. They were all to do with the running of the orphanage, nothing personal. A small shelf on one wall held a selection of books. Some work books, a couple of popular mysteries, and a thin volume whose spine looked familiar.
Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova
. The same edition Chinara had owned, one of her favorites that she read over and over, even when the wolf of cancer began to devour her.

I read a line at random:
Here is my gift, not grave-mound roses, not incense-sticks
. Who knows what gifts the dead will accept from us, as we hope to do more than appease our guilt at remaining behind? An imam or a priest might be able to tell you, a philosopher could define the problem, but I’m just Murder Squad. There’s only one thing I know how to give the dead. Justice.

I walked back into the kitchen, held the bowl of
chai
under the tap, watched the dark tea leaves swirl and pattern the sink. Some people think they can foretell the future that way, and they might be right. As long as you believe the future is dark, messy, easy to simply rinse away.

I turned the cup upside down to dry, ran a finger over the counter top. No dust yet, but only a matter of time, like everything else.

An old-fashioned brass weighing scale was virtually the only piece of equipment in the kitchen, apart from a frying pan and a three-layer
pelmeni
steamer, presumably a souvenir from Oksana’s time. The different-sized weights were cold in my hand as I dropped them into the left-hand pan and watched the right-hand one rise. And then I understood the meaning of Gurminj’s note.
Balance is where answers might be found.

I tipped the weights out of the pan and picked up the scale, turned it upside down, found the paper taped to the underside. I peeled away the tape, looked at what was written on the paper. A cell phone number, with an international code. A number I already knew.