City of Ghosts by Ben Creed (most important books of all time txt) 📕

blink away the imprint of his own blood vessels on his pupils, wondering how Sergeant Taneyev had survived three decades in the militia without someone arranging some sort of accident or denouncing him to the MGB.

He looked back at the train. Its headlight was still shining fiercely and behind it was only darkness. That seemed to be the choice he was facing – searing light or total blackness. Rossel was not normally a religious man – the opposite, in fact. The teachers at the state orphanage in Kostroma had made sure of that. Taught him to worship only Marx and Lenin, after the secret police had come for his parents. In his teenage years he had even been a member of the League of the Militant Godless, and there was nobody more radically atheist than those lunatics. ‘The struggle against religion is the struggle for the Five-Year Plan!’ – the slogans were etched onto his brain. But there was something about this crime scene, much more than any other he had witnessed – the fastidious arrangement of the figures on the track; the primordial bleakness of the surrounding landscape and the incessant, banshee murmur made by the wind coming off Lake Ladoga. Deep drifts, darkness and dead bodies. It all brought back any number of memories from the siege of Leningrad. And of his sister, Galya, whose face he had last glimpsed fading into a blizzard many years ago. The lieutenant felt the urge to cross himself.

The officers regrouped, drawn together by the next corpse. It was wrinkled all over, like it belonged to an old man.

‘Number three,’ Grachev resumed. ‘As you can see, this one’s completely naked. Similar treatment, but with some additional work. I cleared the snow around him a bit and found some delicacies. That’s his heart, I reckon.’ He pointed to the brown lump next to the body. ‘And those other things next to the heart are his balls. His prick’s still on, though. Lucky devil!’

All the corpses lay over both sets of tracks where they ran side by side. In three cases the heads lay on the rails; in the other two, they lolled between them.

Rossel stepped away from body number three and took a look around, inwardly berating himself for his carelessness. Bleary with sleep and cold, he’d assumed he was on his way to some sort of stupid accident. Alcohol to blame, nine times out of ten. And if the secret police had been involved, well, the worst it could have been was an execution. In those cases, you made it your job to blunder all over the crime scene and ask all the wrong questions, or none at all. Cart the poor sods off and invent a cause of death.

But there was no blood. The faces were a mess but there did not seem to be any exit wounds, so there had been no shots to the back of the head, secret police-style. No rope binding the hands or feet.

Maniac. Maybe Lipukhin was right.

The cops had all left clear sets of footprints from the car to the railway but none of them had checked to see if there were any other traces of the person, or persons, who had brought the bodies to their resting place. Rossel looked the other way, across the open ground to the forest on the other side of the tracks, along the main line and the secondary line. Where did that lead, anyway? But there were no footprints, no scars in the snow that a dragged corpse might have made, no tyre tracks.

‘When did it stop snowing?’

Rossel’s voice stopped his men as they were settling down to corpse number four. They looked at one another.

‘It was snowing when I went on shift,’ said Grachev. ‘After that I was head down in paperwork. Seemed to be snowing the whole time, though.’

Paperwork? From eight in the evening until two in the morning? Rossel doubted it. Sergeant Grachev preferred to concentrate on his smoking, and on keeping a weather eye out for any prostitutes brought into the station he could rape.

‘It was snowing when I went to bed,’ said Lipukhin. ‘About . . .’ he faltered. ‘About ten.’

Rossel saw Grachev and Taneyev smirk. About ten when you slid under the table, comrade?

So, none of them had any idea. Best guess was that the snow had stopped sometime between two and four. But it had been coming down for most of the early winter, coming down like God wanted to bury the world and never see it again. Here it was up to their thighs. You could rake enough powder over your tracks and wait for the weather to do the rest. The five bodies lying on the railway lines near Lake Ladoga might as well have fallen out of the sky.

The fourth corpse was also male. But it looked like the body of a younger man – more muscle definition, no sagging flesh. Perhaps as young as twenty but no more than forty, Rossel thought. It was naked and mutilated like the third except that, as Grachev said with a malevolent grin, ‘both prick and balls are in place this time. And look at that girth, in this temperature, too. If there’s pussy in Heaven those bitches are going to get themselves nice and wet when this fine young gallant turns up.’

Last one. Rossel lit another papirosa from the remnants of his previous one and double-pinched the cardboard filter.

‘Oh shit,’ said Grachev. ‘Oh fuck.’

Rossel looked across at the sergeant kneeling over the corpse, saw him brush a clump of snow off its head and point at it.

‘This one’s a blue-top,’ said Grachev. ‘This one’s MGB.’

Her cap was, indeed, blue-topped with a red band and black visor. The tunic had flashes on the sleeves and throat that Rossel couldn’t identify, blue thread at the wrists, and epaulettes without any markings. A corroded badge was clipped to the breast – he could just make out a sword designating the bearer as a member of