A Killing Winter by Tom Callaghan Read Free Book Online Page A

many trees there, too much cover, no one around. He could have been hiding, waiting for the next one. Maybe five minutes earlier and it could have been me.’
    She waved her glass again at Shairkul, and this time I let her drink, a single long swallow that left her breathless.
    ‘So you took the handbag and legged it?’
    ‘What would you have done?’
    ‘You didn’t touch the body?’
    ‘You are joking. I just grabbed the handbag and I was away on my toes. Didn’t even look inside until I was in a taxi.’
    ‘Any money?’
    Gulbara looked at me as if I was a
myrki
peasant straight up from the village. I sighed.
    ‘I need to know if she was robbed as well. If it was about money or about something else. So I want to know, right?’
    Gulbara muttered something I didn’t catch.
    ‘How much?’
    ‘A thousand dollars. New notes. Hundreds.’
    ‘And where is it?’
    She looked away.
    ‘You fed the
krokodil
?’
    She said nothing, but glanced down at the tracks on her arm. My only witness a junkie, any hint at motive snug in a dealer’s back pocket, and snow starting to fall again. Christ.
    I snapped my fingers.
    ‘Bag. Now.’
    Shairkul reached into the wall cupboard and pulled out a smart shoulder bag, the sort a woman might wear to an exclusive party, drinks in the 191 Bar, a job interview at one of the embassies. To my eyes, it looked expensive, but I’m a man, what do I know?
    Chinara would have been able to tell me the label, the date, the price from across the room. Her handbags, her jewellery, even her shoes, still in the wardrobe, waiting for me to find the courage to get rid of them, dispose of her presence. For a second, I could have sworn I could smell the perfume she wore, as if she’d entered the room, was standing behind me. And then I remembered she’d gone.
    For ever.
    I took the bag from Shairkul and gently put it down on the red rug that was the concrete floor’s only covering. Rich, soft cream leather. Ornate gold metal clasp. A logo saying ‘Prada’. If it had said
Pravda
, I might have been better informed.
    ‘A good-quality bag? Expensive?’
    The two girls looked aghast at my ignorance.
    ‘Maybe fifteen hundred dollars. And the real thing too. Not bought here, but abroad, maybe GUM.’
    I couldn’t help sighing. GUM is the ornate building that sits on Red Square facing the Kremlin, probably the most expensive cluster of boutiques in the world. Anyone whocould afford to buy there was bound to have influence, people who would demand quick results and a head on a platter. And if I couldn’t find a killer, I knew whose head it would be.
    ‘You take anything else besides the money?’
    Gulbara shook her head and watched me open the bag. BlackBerry, keys, lipstick, a pair of gold hoop earrings and, tucked into a zipped pocket, the thing I’d hoped to find. An ID card.
    The face I found under the trees stared back at me. The same calm, the same detachment. The face lying in a drawer waiting to be claimed.
    I read the name.
    And realised that I was in a world of shit.

Chapter 7
    Iwas in a patrol car, on my way back to Sverdlovsky Station, the windscreen wipers struggling against the snow with a dull, relentless screech. Pretty much what I expected to hear once I saw the Chief. I’d put in the call before I organised a ride, knowing that he’d been overjoyed at being woken up and asked to meet me at the station. No one could ever mistake a Tatar for a sunny day, but my boss lived in an almost permanent state of rage.
    The cop at the wheel swore almost constantly as the car slithered and slid through the snow: at the weather, at the authorities for failing to clear the roads and, under his breath, at me for hauling him halfway across the city. As we passed the memorial to the dead killed in the last revolution, the floral tributes were almost invisible under fresh snowdrifts, just as Chinara’s grave up in the mountains – and the grave someone would dig for the girl under the birch trees