Punishment of a Hunter Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Available and Coming Soon from Pushkin Vertigo

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  I

  Zaitsev glanced back at the top of the report. Again that feeling that his eyeballs were being rubbed with sandpaper. His gaze ran back down the page, but again he took nothing in.

  Victim: Faina Borisovna Baranova, thirty-four, no party affiliation. Bookkeeper at an industrial co-operative. Unmarried.

  Hmm, that’s a shame, thought Zaitsev. The spouse is usually the first on the list.

  So—no suspects. Nothing to go on. Not even the hint of a lead.

  Zaitsev switched on the green-shaded desk lamp. Not that it made any difference. A soft blue sky peered in at the window. The usual deception of Leningrad’s white nights. Without even pretending to get dark, the June evening had long since closed the shop doors and swept the traffic off the roads. The city’s residents had their thick curtains drawn tight, as they tried to make room for some troubled sleep amid the ceaseless expanse of light that day and night had been for the past month. The somnolent streets were as bright as day.

  Zaitsev laid out the photographs under the lamp.

  Faina Baranova was killed in her room. In the black-and-white photographs, the pinkish wallpaper became a light grey. The murdered woman was slumped in an armchair by the window. The heavy curtains were pushed to the side. He could see the Public Library through the window.

  Zaitsev turned the sheet of paper over and checked the address: 25th October Prospekt. On the corner of Nevsky and Sadovaya, then.

  Again the letters jumbled into meaningless symbols. Zaitsev suppressed a yawn. He could barely hear himself think: there was too much noise coming in, interference. The Leningrad Criminal Investigation Department was bustling on all floors with the usual nocturnal activity. Someone was being led away; someone was being interrogated. From one direction there were sobs, from another furious swearing. And in all the corridors and offices, yellow light bulbs glowed needlessly. The air reeked of tobacco smoke.

  So, Faina—Faina Baranova. Zaitsev picked up the photo again. He forced his mind to visualize the black-and-white image in colour, to recall what he had seen earlier that evening. His mind’s eye turned the edges of the picture into a door frame—the doorway through which Zaitsev had first glimpsed this woman. Or rather, her corpse.

  “So, Vasya, do we force it open?” Agent Martynov had asked him as they arrived at the victim’s door that evening. He pushed his cap back from his forehead to wipe off the sweat. His eyes were red, with bags underneath. Martynov had been up all night on a stake-out in one of the large tenement blocks on Ligovsky Prospekt. Then he’d had to do the write-up. He hadn’t managed to get home before a new day started and now the squad had been summoned to 25th October Prospekt.

  “Wait a little longer, and you shall have a rest,” sang Demov in a strained falsetto, as he dragged along the case containing their crime-scene-investigation kit. In his other hand he clutched a folded camera tripod.

  “Sod off, Demov,” snarled Martynov. He blinked; the air was thick with steam from about a dozen different dinners being cooked at once. You could barely walk down the narrow, shared corridor for junk left there by the residents who couldn’t fit it in their rooms. This had once been a spacious, bourgeois apartment. Now there was a family squeezed into each room. A typical Leningrad communal flat. The corridor was suddenly crowded with personnel arriving on the scene. The neighbours’ doors opened as they gingerly peeked out. Zaitsev felt someone brush against his back. He turned around to see a little woodland gnome of a man.

  “Is there a problem, comrade?” Zaitsev snapped.

  “Comrades, there’s nothing to see,” Demov told the neighbours who were emerging into the corridor, including those who had initially planned to sit tight until the police came and knocked at their doors. Curiosity had got the better of them.

  Zaitsev examined the flimsy lock. The two witnesses loitered behind him: the janitor for the block and the house manager.

  “She hasn’t opened her door since yesterday,” mumbled the woodland gnome. He was the one who had called the police. Their colleague Samoilov emerged from the steam emanating from the communal kitchen.

  “I called the co-operative. Baranova didn’t show up at work.”

  Zaitsev nodded. Martynov leant against the wall and paused with his eyes closed. I should have sent him home, thought Zaitsev. He had barely got a word of sense out of Martynov today.

  “Might she have gone somewhere?” suggested Agent Serafimov, standing behind him. Zaitsev turned around. His colleague had a rosy blush and golden curls, like an angel from a pre-revolutionary Easter card. And the surname to match.

  “Get away!” spluttered a peasant in a traditional smock, a tolstovka. “Don’t you think we’d know if she had?”

  “She reports to you, does she?” Zaitsev looked him in the eye briefly.

  “Oof, look at him gawping like that,” muttered an old woman. Zaitsev pretended not to have heard.

  “What would she need to report to us for?” said the man in the long tolstovka, offended. “As if we neighbours can’t see with our own eyes. We’re all on good terms here, I’ll thank you very much. This lot’ll tell you so. Our relations towards Faina Borisovna are of the most respectful kind, notwithstanding her being of Jewish origin and all. She’s an earnest woman, neat and tidy.”

  “A dog! Ooh, a dog!” Along the corridor, there was a rustle of whispers and gasps as the police dog slipped through the crowd of onlooking neighbours. This large German shepherd with a black patch on its back was a descendant of the legendary Ace of Clubs, a star player in the Leningrad CID around a decade ago. It had inherited the same ancestral name.

  The handler quietly gave the dog a command.

  Ace froze for a second—as though the scent had become a sound and demanded absolute silence—then started scraping its claws against the door.

  “Open it up, Martynov,” commanded Zaitsev.

  The handler took the dog by the collar as Martynov inserted a short crowbar between the door and the frame and pressed. At first the crowbar slipped, tearing off a strip of veneer from the door. Martynov seemed to wake up with a jolt and gave Zaitsev a sheepish glance. This time, he put the crowbar into position more carefully.

  The door to Faina Baranova’s room welcomed them with a crunch as it burst open. Behind them was a muddle of excited voices.

  “Neighbours, please back off!” barked Zaitsev. “Witnesses, is this Citizen Baranova?”

  “It is,” confirmed the janitor, diligently stretching his neck to peer over Zaitsev’s shoulder.

  “Thank you, comrade. Citizens, nothing to goggle at here!” Zaitsev boomed at the neighbours in the corridor as he stepped over the threshold into the room. “Everyone will be interviewed in turn.”

  “Stand back, comrades.” Serafimov firmly manoeuvred the curious neighbours back into the gloomy corridor.

  “Off you go, Serafimov. You start working through the neighbours,” Zaitsev whispered to him. Serafimov nodded and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  Zaitsev focused on Faina Baranova as though she and he were alone in the room. Before Demov started sprinkling his black powder eve
rywhere in search of fingerprints, and before Martynov started yanking open drawers and banging cupboard doors, Zaitsev wanted to take in the entire scene with one glance. The first impression counts for a lot.

  The room was cluttered but large, with two tall windows.

  Faina Baranova was sitting in an armchair by the window. One arm lay on the armrest. The other lay draped across her stomach. In her right hand was a white rose. In her left, a feather duster. The kind used more by cleaners than by housewives.

  “A black rose is a symbol of grief,” Martynov observed. But the rose Baranova was holding was white. Still, Martynov had a point: the woman had an aura of disquiet and drama. Behind her, the silk curtains formed a scarlet backdrop. Against the deep red, her velvet dress seemed even blacker and the white rose even more dazzling. There was something almost theatrical about the contrast of scarlet, black and white, a contrast that was softened by the iridescence of the silk, the softness of the velvet and the tenderness of the petals.

  Baranova’s posture was so natural that at first Zaitsev could almost believe she was alive. The corpse’s eyes were open.

  “Looks like heart trouble,” said Demov with a nod. He was the oldest in the squad. “One minute you’re fine, the next you’re a goner.”

  “Demov, don’t assume everyone’s past it just because you are. She’s not that old.”

  Demov shrugged his bony shoulders. “OK, she’s not exactly a pensioner, but she’s not particularly young either. It’s a plausible hypothesis.”

  “Call for the transport, Martynov.”

  Martynov went into the corridor to ring for someone to fetch the body.

  Zaitsev noticed a thin, scarlet line on the dead woman’s neck. “Hmm. Bit early to think about calling it a day, then.”

  With one finger he pulled back her white collar to show Demov: a neat red line ran across the neck, like a cut.

  “Her husband’s doing—as clear as day,” said Samoilov, without a moment’s reflection.

  “Hmm. Could be a man or a woman—either would be strong enough,” suggested Demov, as he set up the tripod. “Even a teenager or an old man—we can’t rule anyone out. But most likely a husband or cohabitant, according to the stats. Statistics are a force to be reckoned with.” He paused to look Zaitsev in the eye. “Vasya, it’s time you told the boss I can’t keep on lugging all this heavy equipment around. I have to think of my health. It’s time we had a photographer in the squad.”

  Demov nagged his boss constantly about the need for a dedicated photographer, and it was true: they didn’t have enough personnel. But while he was the oldest in the squad, Demov wasn’t as frail as he made out. He still had plenty of strength left in him. When Zaitsev had joined the squad, Demov had introduced himself as “Demov—old man, hypochondriac, misanthrope”. But when he shook Zaitsev’s hand, he gave it such a squeeze his fingers crunched.

  Demov held up the camera flash.

  “Samoilov, have a look for a string or wire or something, will you?” said Zaitsev. And seeing that Martynov was back, he glanced quickly at his wristwatch with its scratched face and began to dictate: “Body discovered at 6.48…”

  Samoilov banged about, rifling through the drawers of the dresser and the dressing table, flinging open the wardrobe doors.

  “Cause of death: asphyxiation,” Zaitsev dictated mechanically.

  The flash went off, instantly filling the room with light.

  They didn’t find any string.

  Not exactly old… but not particularly young either, thought Zaitsev, as he sat in his office that night, poring over the case. Faina Borisovna Baranova was thirty-four years old. There was also a small photograph of her. Very stiff, lips pressed tightly shut—a typical ID-card pose. She lived alone. A female cousin in Kiev; the neighbours didn’t know of any other relatives. Those neighbours again!

  Zaitsev held the photo at arm’s reach, as if trying to see Faina Baranova with his own eyes, rather than the neighbours’.

  Perhaps Demov was right: Faina Baranova did look older than her years. If not old, then at least marked by pain. Her face was puffy and she had dark bags under her eyes. Mind you, who looked healthy these days? Everyone was malnourished, overworked. Everyone’s day was a constant cycle of work, queues, domestic chores and getting up at the crack of dawn to squeeze on the tram to work again. “And yet she looked after her eyebrows,” Zaitsev muttered to himself.

  And the feather duster. The kind cleaners used. At home, most people used a plain old rag.

  Zaitsev went to the door and shouted into the corridor, “Serafimov, come here a minute!” Zaitsev listened out. He could hear him coming. He went back to contemplating the photographs.

  Serafimov appeared in the doorway.

  “Ah, Serafimov. Find out if Baranova had a cleaner, will you? Seems unlikely… A cleaner who also happens to be an informant?”

  “The neighbours have confirmed that nothing’s been stolen.”

  “They know everything about each other in that flat,” grumbled Zaitsev. “We’ll also need to find out if they’re really as chummy as they make out.”

  Serafimov didn’t answer.

  Zaitsev pressed his fingers against his closed eyelids: the yellow light from the electric lamp bore into his temples. A red rose is a symbol of love, he thought. When he opened his eyes again, a sheet of paper lay neatly on top of the file on his desk. Serafimov lurked at his side. At the top of the sheet was written in perfect handwriting: “notice of resignation”.

  “OK, Serafimov, that’s all for today,” said Zaitsev, not looking at it. He got up from his chair. “I’ll have the rest of the statements by tomorrow. For now let’s call it a day.” The chair grunted as he stood up. “I’m dead beat. Can’t think straight today.”

  “This is my resignation.”

  “What?” Zaitsev strained his eyes to read. “…made voluntarily”. He looked back at Serafimov. “Is this a joke?”

  Serafimov certainly had something angelic about his appearance, like his namesake, the biblical seraphim. It was easy to be taken in by his blue eyes and soft rosy cheeks. Serafimov had been transferred to the squad about five years ago, when there were still shots being fired in the dark streets of Leningrad, and the city was swarming with gangsters. He was straight in at the deep end, spending whole nights waiting in ambush or running through a hail of bullets.

  Zaitsev read the statement, then dropped the sheet onto the table.

  “Serafimov, you’re exhausted. It happens. But there’s no need to do anything reckless. Here, take it. Off you go and sleep it off. I haven’t seen this.”

  But Serafimov grabbed his sleeve. “I’m serious, Vasya.”

  Zaitsev wasn’t yet thirty, like most in the Criminal Investigation Department. But they worked on more cases in a year or two than most teams were faced with in ten years. Zaitsev was none other than Detective Vasily Zaitsev. Comrade Zaitsev. Known only to his close colleagues in Squad 2 as Vasya.

  “Serafimov, we don’t have enough men. Martynov is going from all-nighters straight on to call-outs, Demov is taking photos instead of interviewing neighbours, and you—you want to quit?”

  Zaitsev was surprised by the look on Serafimov’s face.

  “I’m serious,” he repeated softly.

  Zaitsev looked at him. Hmm, so it seemed.

  “OK, sit down.” Zaitsev closed the office door, slicing off the tentacle of tobacco smoke which was swirling in from the corridor.

  Serafimov sat down on the sofa, sinking into the velour cushions. Zaitsev sat on the windowsill. The window was wide open. On the tidal river below, there was a quiet, steady splash of waves against the granite parapet. The River Fontanka gave off wafts of both fresh and rotten smells at the same time.

  “Vasya, don’t waste your time. I’ve already decided,” said Serafimov. His voice was melancholy. The pistol on his hip showed through his skinny jacket. On Serafimov, with his curls, his blue eyes and his rosy cheeks, the weapon looked like a toy.


  “You’ve decided. OK, you’ve decided. I won’t argue with you, you’re a big boy. I’m just curious. What are you going to do? Tram driver? Clerk? What is it? Your girl’s had second thoughts? Wants to marry an accountant? Less of the night shifts and the criminal underground?”

  Serafimov stood up. He walked over to the window. He gestured with his eyes to the closed door. Zaitsev slid off the windowsill and closed the window.

  “What do you think? It’s hardly my choice. They’ll purge me if I don’t go first,” Serafimov explained quietly.

  “Ha!” Zaitsev was surprised. “Purge you? And what dirt has the commission got on you, eh? That you were wounded on duty? That you risked your own life carrying your comrade Govorushkin to safety after he was shot by bandits? That you barely sleep at night? Everyone knows your biography, Serafimov. Men like you are worth their weight in gold here in CID.”

  “It’s fine for you to talk!” exclaimed Serafimov.

  “What about me? How am I different?”

  “It’s all straightforward where you’re concerned.”

  “And what isn’t straightforward about you?”

  They were interrupted by the phone. Zaitsev picked up the receiver and held his hand up to Serafimov, as if to say, “Wait a second.”

  “Zaitsev speaking. Yes, I’m writing it down. Uh-huh. OK, thanks.”

  Irritated, Serafimov stared out of the window.

  Zaitsev hung up. He was animated.

  “Interesting! Baranova’s neighbour called—from the flat. She’s remembered something. Says she wants to talk tomorrow.”

  He checked the file. “Olga Zabotkina. Hmm, a music teacher. Good. Smart old biddies are better at keeping an eye on the neighbours and their admirers than people realize.”

  But Serafimov didn’t share his enthusiasm. “What isn’t straightforward?” he repeated sarcastically. “Well, I suppose it is—especially my background.”

  “What’s he on about?” muttered Zaitsev, having apparently already forgotten what they were talking about. His thoughts were now completely taken up by Olga Zabotkina.