“Boris Ivanovich?” he said, looking at the girl’s head in profile, “if we took a picture from here, the damage isn’t so visible. Maybe we can find out who she was, if we can get it circulated.”
Gueginov nodded and positioned his lamp in preparation. Outside in the mortuary a door banged and then the younger of the attendants came in without knocking.
“Captain Korolev? General Popov wants to speak to you. There’s a phone in the director’s office. Follow me, please.”
Popov’s call turned out to be nothing much, just a request for any new information, but the air in the director’s office was fresh and a chill breeze from an open window rustled across the piles of papers on the desk, each weighed down with a pebble. The director, a middle-aged man with a wide, intelligent face, stood with his back to the window and his arms crossed, looking on as Korolev finished his report. He smiled when Korolev hung up the phone and offered him a cigarette. Korolev accepted it and then cupped a hand around the director’s lighter. He inhaled the rough smoke deep into his lungs-anything to suppress the lingering smell of death. He felt the nicotine worming its way out to his extremities, and the sudden weakness it brought reminded him that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He took a moment to savor the sensation and then nodded his thanks to the director, who waved it away. It was only when he was back at the examination room that Korolev realized they hadn’t exchanged a single word.
In his absence, Gueginov had applied make-up to cover as much as possible of the damage to the girl’s face. It was a trick Korolev had seen him perform before. The first time he’d been surprised at the garish colors, but as the photographs were taken with black and white film the end effect was lifelike. Chestnova was assisting him by positioning the head, using a towel to hold it in place. The head seemed loose in her hands and wouldn’t stay still. Gueginov and Chestnova looked up at him with welcoming smiles and Korolev detected the sharp smell of alcohol. Gueginov pointed at a beaker full of clear liquid.
“Duh-doctor Che-Chestnova fuh-found us some muh-medical spirits, Comrade. It’s the buh-business. That’s yours.”
“It’s best with jam. A little bit of jam in the spirit and it tastes very good. But we have no jam today, I’m afraid.” Dr. Chestnova seemed markedly more cheerful than before. “See? We have made her beautiful.”
“I puh-put cotton wool in her chuh-cheeks, I think it works wuh-wuh-well.”
Gueginov looked down at the corpse with a pleased expression. The girl’s hair was still wet from where Chestnova had washed it clean.
“She was good looking, the girl,” Korolev said, as much to himself as the others.
“Yuh-yes. Do you think we should huh-have the eye open or closed? I’ll tuh-take her in puh-profile obviously.”
Gueginov opened the girl’s eyelid with his thumb and looked to Korolev for approval. Korolev shook his head, disconcerted by the dead girl’s gaze.
“Yuh-yes. I think, you’re ruh-right.” Gueginov said and shut the eye once more. Then, satisfied with the positioning of the girl’s head and the arrangement of her features, Gueginov picked up the camera and the flash lit up the room twice. Chestnova let the head fall back onto the table and the jaw fell open revealing the white teeth and the butchered mouth.
“Notice anything about the teeth, Comrade?” Chestnova asked, picking up the loose head and tilting it toward him once again.
“It looks like he broke a few,” Korolev said, then looked again. “They’re exceptionally white.”
“Indeed, which may be something to note in itself, but see these fillings? Amalgam. Well, Comrade, the Ministry of Health hasn’t permitted our dentists to use amalgam fillings for the last ten years at least. And these fillings weren’t done that long ago.”
“So the fillings were done outside the Soviet Union?”
“Perhaps the girl is a foreigner…”
“Huh-her clothes.” Gueginov’s voice came from the corner where he was holding up her skirt. “They look fuh-foreign to me. No luh-labels, but they feel like cuh-capitalist cluh-clothes. Perhaps she was a suh-saboteur? Fuh-fell out with her fellows and look what happened to her.”
Korolev ran the fabric through his fingers. It felt wondrously soft.
“Perhaps, or she could have worked abroad in an embassy or with a trade delegation. And, of course, there are plenty of foreigners in Moscow these days. Volunteers, industrial specialists, Comintern employees and so on. We may be able to match her teeth to dental records if she’s listed as a missing person. We’ll look into it. Thank you-an excellent observation.”
Dr. Chestnova smiled proudly, although perhaps a little lopsidedly. Korolev wondered how much medical spirit the two of them had drunk while he’d been out of the room.
“I always do my duty,” she said, reaching for a saw from the tray of instruments that stood beside the operating table. “And now I shall look into the brain.”
Korolev felt his jaw clench. He took a quick look at his watch and gave a curt nod to the others.
“Please call me if there are any further developments. I have to get back to Petrovka.”
He decided to ignore the muffled giggle that followed him from the room.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was past nine o’clock when Korolev finished combining his notes on the autopsy and the crime scene into a report for General Popov. While the autopsy had thrown up some interesting possibilities, not least that the dead woman was a foreigner, the forensic investigation team had come up with very little, as Semionov had predicted. There were fingerprints all over the room, but the fingermarks that were bloody had all turned out either to have been made by gloves, probably leather, or had belonged to the dead woman. They’d begin fingerprinting the Komsomol members who frequented the church in the morning, but the head of the forensic team thought it unlikely that they would come up with anything useful, especially as they had taken several hundred impressions from the sacristy alone. Korolev cursed under his breath as he finished writing and then began to read from the beginning for mistakes.
He took his time, considering the available facts from every angle. As he read, he began to form in his mind a very loose picture of the murderer and, indeed, of the victim. Nothing substantial, just feelings and impressions, but he’d been an investigator long enough to know intuition should never be ignored. Even though it was hard for him to be definite, he was beginning to think the killing showed an element of forethought that was unusual. For a start, the murderer’s wearing of gloves and the lack of any forensic data indicated a care and detachment not present in the violent sexual murders he’d investigated previously. Usually the murderer was caught up in the fever of the moment and therefore careless. He might try to clear up evidence afterward, but by that stage he was in a state of elation, fear or shock, and his efforts were affected accordingly. This fellow seemed to be different. Yes, there was blood, gore and lots of unpleasant detail, but there was very little evidence. He’d been careful and, as if to confirm Korolev’s supposition, there were no signs of rape. There was torture, clearly, but the use of electricity, the way the body parts had been arranged and the deliberate nature of the injuries made him wonder whether the mutilations hadn’t some significance outside the violent act itself. He was even beginning to suspect that the mutilations might be a smokescreen and that the murder might have a motive beyond the obvious.
He rubbed his eyes as he finished and looked at his watch. It had been a full day and it was time he made his way home. He smiled at the thought. His cousin’s partitioned room had been tiny with only enough space for a bed for Mikhail and a mattress on the floor for Korolev, their clothes hanging from nails on the wall. They’d listened at night to their neighbors whispered squabbles and even quieter lovemaking, whispering in turn to each other as they passed a bottle backward and forward. At least in the new apartment there would be space, far above the norm for the Moscow district, and a degree of privacy that most citizens only saw in films, and foreign films at that. He felt like pinching himself.