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

you could saunter to the shelter like that, as if you were marked by the Fuhrer so his bombs knew to let you live . . .’

*

Dr Volkova emerged at intervals throughout the afternoon to feed them information about body number five, the man with beluga in his stomach.

‘He shows signs of strangulation. The eyes had an extremely high level of abnormally blood-filled cells, though skin impressions in the region of the neck were very light.’

‘What does that indicate, Doctor?’ asked Rossel.

‘Someone who is enjoying the kill. It takes a lot less force than your average murderer realises to finish someone off. Most victims end up with massive bruising around the neck, whether strangulation is manual or by ligature. But this suggests repeated asphyxiation of a pliant victim, with the minimum force required, and probably therefore a prisoner who was made to lose consciousness whenever the strangler wanted. He was really playing with this one.’

The rest of the day continued in similar fashion, making phone calls in order to book more phone calls, while Dr Volkova continued to dissect, weigh and analyse the cadavers as Lipukhin stayed with her taking notes.

At around eight o’clock in the evening, Lipukhin dropped two neat reports onto Rossel’s desk and sat down opposite them.

‘I sent Gerashvili home. She needs more time. But I have followed up on the file you asked her about. I have looked everywhere. Missing persons files are circulated to all departments in the city but there is no Sorokin.’

Rossel sighed.

‘Felix was at the heart of every rumour, every party. Always flirting, always laughing.’

‘I’m sorry about your friend. About all of this,’ said Lipukhin.

‘Don’t be. Just because there is no file doesn’t mean that nobody knew he was missing,’ he said. ‘Only that, if he was, nobody reported it. And the reason for that, I suspect, was that he was either still registered in the army or the Ministry of Defence. If he went missing, it would be the army on the lookout for him, even the MGB, but not the militia.’ He thought back to his conversation with Marina in the opera house. A sweet boy – we were close for a while but . . .

‘Call the ministry in Moscow first,’ said Rossel. ‘Don’t just establish if he was working there. Find out as much as you can about his movements – where he lived, where he went on holiday, where his family is, if anyone is still alive.’

The captain nodded, both accepting his task and acknowledging that their roles were now reversed. He pointed to the map Rossel had splayed out over his desk.

‘What’s that?’

Rossel stood and pointed his finger at the place on the map where the bodies had been found.

‘Why there? Have we thought enough about that?’ he said. ‘We know who three of them are and now have a good candidate for number four. We will have the fifth soon, I hope. But perhaps I have been asking the wrong question all this time. Concentrating on who, too much, at the expense of where. Normal passenger lines run side by side but anything you left on them would get run over within an hour or two. I’ve scoured this map and there are only two places in that area, along the length of Lake Ladoga’s western shore and for thirty miles inland, where two single railway lines, along different routes, meet and run directly parallel, side by side like that, for a few metres before diverging. These are old freight routes. One is near Sosnovo, next to a brick factory. The other is where we found the bodies, further north.’

‘You think the place itself is, perhaps, personally significant? To the murderer, I mean?’

Rossel looked up from the map, exhaled a cloud of smoke.

‘There’s nothing there except those lines, and a turn-off in the road. But after another 55 kilometres, that turning leads to some large dachas, which in turn indicates the presence, at least occasionally, of some very important people.’

‘Party officials. Do you think that’s why Nikitin let us out?’

Rossel sighed.

‘I’m not sure. It’s just possible he genuinely doesn’t know who murdered those poor bastards and he actually wants someone to find out. But he doesn’t want to be standing anywhere near them when they do.’

28

Asking Vassya to join him for a cognac in the communal kitchen was the closest Rossel had got to asking anyone on a date for a good while. Now, despite his dire situation, he still felt a little foolish.

The potential significance of the stranger in their kitchen did not go unnoticed by the other residents of the fourth floor. Most confined themselves to sticking their heads around the door. Either because they were ashamed, since some of them had walked past him when he was lying in the street outside, or because he had recently been in prison, which could be contagious. Only Lena, the art history student, scornful of her neighbours’ behaviour, attempted to wait on them hand and foot. Conversation with a grinning, gurning teenage girl present was difficult, however, so in the end he sent her away.

‘This won’t work,’ said Vassya, once she was gone.

‘What won’t?’

‘You using me like this to make everything seem normal. To make it seem like it can all go back to the way it was before you discovered those bodies out by the lake. That you could hear my music through the floorboards, and then, somehow, we could meet and take a liking to each other, and drink tea, like this, and go to the Maly Hall to listen to a concert or two and then go back to my room and complete the evening’s entertainment. Like you used to do with her – Sofia, I suppose.’

Rossel reached across the table and touched her hand. She looked down, curious at the stiffness of his touch and the bumps and strange angles of his fingers.

Then the front door to the kommunalka shook as someone began to batter it from the outside.

Vassya withdrew her